Liberation, August-September 1969

T^C MOVEMENT
330 GROVE

SAN FRANCISCO CA 94102

special double issue on the movement

LIBERATIO

THE MOVEMENT:
10 YEARS EROM NOW

carl Oglesby:

Julius lestei^^^^^^

to recapture the dream

noam Chomsky

some tasks for the left

>o: aronson • waskow * cook
newf ield • ly nd * naison

paul good man: reflections on the moon
florence ho we: the education of women

notes on a decade

the english teacher as civilizer

The Daley Gesture
jack levine

2

A ugust-Sept ember, 1969

August-September, 1969
Volume 14, no. 5 ,6

mm

Staff

Susan Danielson
Jeanne Friedman
David Gelber
Lamar Hoover
Chris Pollock
Barbara Webster

SYMPOSIUM: The Movement Ten Years from Now

5 Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin Carl Oglesby
20 A New Sensibility Rooted in Rebellion JackNewfield
22 Beyond Old and New Left James Aronson
26 To Recapture the Dream Julius Lester
31 In Defense of SDS Mark Naison

35 Mighty Mice Bill Crawford

36 Getting to Know America Bob Cook

38 Some Tasks for the New Left Noam Chomsky
44 A Program for Post-Campus Radicals Staughton Lynd
46 Business, Religion, and the Left Arthur Waskow
ARTICLES

49 The Education of Women Florence Howe

56 A Guide to the Grand Jury Brian Glick and Kathy Boudin

59 Poetry Chris Pollock

60 Reflections on the Moon Paul Goodman
COMMUNICATIONS

63 An Exchange Jon Weissman and Staughton Lynd
65 The English Teacher as Civilizer Barbara Kessel

Editorial Board Associate Editors

A.J. Muste (18851967) Kay Boyle

Dave Dellinger, Editor Nat Hentoff

Barbara Deming Mult'ord Sibley

Paul Goodman
Sidney Lens
Staughton Lynd

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Copyright 1 969 by LIBERA TION

Some of the photography in this issue is courtesy of Magnum
and these prints may be found in Crisis in America. Photo-
graphs by Jeanne Friedman and Amelio Grossi are also in-
cluded. Interested readers may contact the photographers
at Liberation .

We would like to extend our thanks to Miss Linda Anderson
of Associated American Artists who helped us secure the
artwork in several of the articles. Located at 663 Fifth
Avenue in New York, Associated American Artists is the
repository of the largest collection of prints in America.

Special thanks to Jack Levine, whose print on page 2 has
never appeared in print before.

Liberation is soliciting artwork for future issues. If you are
interested in appearing in Liberation please contact Jeanne
Friedman, 674-0050.

Liberation

3

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issue of Liberation

the hope that n number of leading activists could M
intermediate, go&ts for a revolutionary humanist tfercsl
the freedom from a rigid format, the opportunity to
pleased with the results. Many of the articles, Carl 0{
hopes for the future on events of the recent past Act
analysis oh the present condition of the movement as
emphasis and point of view, ail &ha re the as&umpt
caprcahsm Is fundamentally Incompatible with hum
Oglesby. Mewiield, Chomsky, Lester, Nelson, Aroiroj
creation of a pnlfiical force which can reach put tip tfl
fru&r^ted and brutalized by a system ovn^ which they i
Uberhiiort certainly does nor Intend hs symposia
to set aside ample space m the October issue far tl
readers. Let ushesrfrdrri yo'u-

se. We ere
toe their
\rt with an

rs art planning

►posals of <Sur

August-September, 1969

r Jhe idea of trying to visualize ourselves five or ten years
from now seems to me hopeless but necessary, so Pm writing
a letter instead of a paper just because it seems easier in the
former to float, stammer, and skip.

Hopeless— to put it most abstractly— because I don’t
think we have anything like a predictive science of political
economy. We approach having an explanatory art of his-
tory, I think, and sometimes we can build up a head of
steam-bound analogies and go crashing an inch or so
through the future barrier, but it always turns out we land
sideways or even upside down. And more practically, hope-
less because in a situation as sensitive as what the world’s
in now, mankind as a whole lives under the permanent
Terror of the Accidental.

But necessary, too, this idea, because even if we’re never
going to surpass improvisatory politics, we could still im-
provise better if we were clearer about ourselves and the

Liberation

Notes on a Decade
Ready forthe Dustbin

Carl Oglesby

country, and the effort to think about the future always
turns out to be an effort to think about the present. Which
is all to the good. So Til start with the past— to get a sense
of trajectory, if any, or the rhythm of our experience, to
see if there’s a line of flight:

1960-64

A well the Freedom Rides as Greensboro? But then, as
well the desegregation decision as the Freedom
Rides . . . etc. Whenever it began, this was the Heroic Pe-
riod, the movement’s Bronze Age. In transition ever since,
the movement has yet to prove it will have a Classical
Period, but maybe we’re on the verge. Essentially, a single-
issue reform politics; integration the leading public demand,
although underneath that demand, there’s a sharply rising
sense that a structural maldistribution of wealth won’t be
corrected by the abolition of Jim Crow. An implicitly
radical democratic communitarianism, projected correctly
as both a means and an end of the movement, can still
co-exist with a formless and rather annoyed liberalism be-
cause (a) the Peace People are obfuscating the Cold War
without yet having become suspicious characters, and
(b) the reform tide seems to be running, picking up velo-
city and mass, and has still to hit the breakwater. But
there’s a richness in the decentralist idioms of this period
that has only been neglected, certainly not exhausted, or
even barely tapped, in the intervening half decade of transi-
tion.

1965

\£ry quick, sharp changes, engineered in part by John-
son, in part by self-conscious growth within the movement.

*The war abruptly becomes the leading issue for most
white radicals. But not for community organizers, some of
whom in fact are bitter about the new preoccupation. This
is neither the first nor the last time that this sort of
friction develops. What is its general form? A nationalist vs.
an internationalist consciousness? It appears that some acti-
vists will always tend to visualize the American people
mainly as victims, and others will tend to see them as
criminal accomplices (passive or not) of the ruling class.
This maybe points to an abiding problem for an
advanced-nation socialist movement-a problem which will
be neither understood nor solved simply by the Trotskyist
slogan, “Bring the troops home.”

*The teach-ins and the SDS April March on Washington
repeat in a compressed time scale the civil-rights move-
ment’s growth from Greensboro to Selma. It’s in this very
brief, very intense period that SDS projects an unabashedly
reformist critique of the war, our naive attack on the
domino theory being the best illustration of this: “But the
other dominos won ’t fall,” we insisted, happy to give such
reassurance to the Empire.

*SNCC formalizes its transformation from reform to
revolution, first, by explicating the connection between
racism and the war; and second, by focusing the metaphor

of Black Power, which clearly (at least to hindsight) im-
plied the forthcoming ghetto-equals-colony analysis and the
shift from an integrationist to a separatist-nationalist poli-
tics, which of course was to bring two problems for every
one it solved. This shift seems to have been necessitated by
the impasse which integrationism confronted at Atlantic
City the previous year.

*What was the Atlantic City of the white student move-
ment that was to go from pro-peace to anti-wax, anti-war
to pro-NLF, pro-NLF to anti-imperialist to pro-Third World
revolution to anti-capitalism to pro-socialism-and thence,
with much more confusion and uncertainty than this
schedule implies, to anti-peace (i.e., no co-existence) and
anti-democracy (“bourgeois jive”), and which finds itself at
the present moment broken into two, three, many factions,
each of which claims to have the real Lenin (or Mao or Che)
in its pocket? Riddled with vanguarditis and galloping sec-
tarianism, and possessed of a twisty hallucination called the
“mass line” like an ancient virgin her incubus (or is it just
a hot water bottle?) the Rudd-Jones-Ayers SDS is at least
an SDS with a past. I’ll say later what I think is wrong
with the mass-line stance, but the point here is to under-
stand that it didn’t just come upon SDS out of nowhere,
not even the nowhere of the PIP, and that in the end,
whatever you think of it, it has to happen: (a) because
there was no way to resist the truth of the war, no way,
that is, to avoid imperialism; (b) because once the policy
critique of the war had been supplanted by the structural
critique of the empire, all political therapies short of social-
ist revolution appeared to become senseless; and
(c) because the necessity of a revolutionary strategy was,
in effect, the same thing as the necessity of Marxism-Lenin-
ism. There was-and is-no other coherent , integrative , and
explicit philosophy of revolution

J do not want to be misunderstood about this. The
practical identity of Marxism-Leninism with revolutionary
theory, in my estimate, does not mean that Marxism-Lenin-
ism is also identical with a genuinely revolutionary practice
in the advanced countries. That identity, rather, constitutes
nothing more than a tradition, a legacy, and a problem
which 1 think the Left will have to overcome. But at the
same time, I don’t think the American Left’s first stab at
producing for itself a fulfilled revolutionary consciousness
could have produced anything better, could have gone
beyond this ancestor-worship politics. It was necessary to
discover-or maybe the word is confess— that we had ances-
tors in the first place; and if for no brighter motive than
gratitude at not being so alone and rootless, the discovery of
the ancestors would naturally beget a religious mood.
That of the revival tent, no doubt, but religious all the
same.

Again: Why did the white student Left so quickly aban-
don its liberal or reformist criticism of the war as policy
and substitute its radical criticism of the war as the result
of an imperialist structure? The former seems to have had
much to recommend it: simple, straightforward, full of
pathos and even sentimentality, it has by this time been
linked (by liberals) to a still more pathos-laden cry to bring

(5

A ugust-Sept ember, 1969

mos. I think it can be shown that the practice of this essen-
tia] work had already been jaopardized by the over-all charac-
ter of production in the late 5 50s. Those whose role in
production is to explain production, to provide it with
its cover of rationality, had found it impossible to play
their role convincingly simply because production had be-
come extrinsically anti-social. Workers who cannot do their
work rebel. They do so, furthermore, in the name of their
work, in behalf of its possibility, and therefore in the name
of that reordered system in which their work would again
become possible.

The main point here is that 1965 was the year in which
both the black and white sectors of the movement explicit-
ly abandoned reformism and took up that long march
whose destination, not even in sight yet, is a theory and
practice of revolution for the United States. For the West.

1966-67

the boys back, and these two thrusts— save our boys and
(incidentally) their babies— now make up the substance of
the popular complaints against the war. (Harriman is now
saying what we said about the war four years ago. What
happened was that the student movement traded this easy
argument against the war for a much harder one. Not that
we rose as one man to denounce imperialism, of course. It
was in October of that year that Paul Booth told the
nation that SDS only wanted to “build, not burn.” But he
got into a lot of trouble for his pains; and when about a
month later, at the SANE-organized March on Washington,
I used (without knowing it) all the paraphernalia of an
anti-imperialist critique without once using the word “im-
perialism, ’’ nobody objected, nobody said, “This line com-
mits us to an attempt at revolution and therefore, true or
not, should be rejected as being politically impracticable.”
Why did our movement want to be “revolutionary?”
Very generally: An extrinsic failure of production (i.e.,
production turned against social reproduction) had already
been intuited by that sector of the workers whose function
is to pacify the relations of production . The most general
means of this pacification is the neutralizing of the moral
environment. This is what poets, political scientists, lit.
teachers, sociologists, preachers, etc. are supposed to do.
Deflect, divert, apologize, change the subject, prove either
that our gods are virtuous and our direction right or that
no gods are virtuous and no direction right and that rebel-
lion ought therefore to forego history and take on the Cos-

The rise of the resistance (in all its variety) and experi-
ments with a “new-working-class” analysis, both motions
strongly influenced by Greg Calvert and Carl Davidson.
Superficially, these developments seemed to be congruent
and intersupportive. But it looks to me now as if they were
in fact opposite responses to the general problem of con-
ceiving and realizing a revolutionary strategy, each one
being a kind of political bet which the other one hedged.
There was, I know, a lot of heavy theorizing about the
politics of resistance, and I don’t want to turn a complex
experience into a simple memory. Still, I think it’s fair to
take the slogans as being indicative of its political atmos-
phere— “Not with my life, you don’t!” for example, or “A
call to resist illegitimate authority.” Even if only in em-
bryo, I think “resistance” was at bottom a youth-based
anti-fascist front whose most central demand must have
appeared to any outsider’s eye to be for a return to the
status quo ante , That’s not to say that its organizers were
not radicals or that its inner content was anti-socialist or
non-socialist. But in basing itself on the individual’s rights
of self-determination (mythical, of course: we were all hip
to the con), and in trying to depict Johnson’s as an
imposter (“illegitimate”) regime, the Resistance was easily
as unassuming in its politics as it was extravagant in its
imagination.

At the same time, Carl (“I Blush to Remember”) David-
son, among others, was trying to work out a new-working-
class concept of the student rebellion, the main purpose
being to discover in this rebellion that revolutionary power
which one feared it might not have. Wanting revolution
(with all that implies about the power to make one) but
only having spasms of campus rebellion, the student syndi-
calists needed to show that at least the seed of the first
found fertile ground in the latter.

Meanwhile: The method of political action which had
been reintroduced in Harlem-’64 or Watts-’65 was on some
terms perfected in Detroit-’67. All whites are convinced
that something will have to be done, but nobody knows
quite what to do. Except, of course, for the Right, which

Liberation

7

What happened at Columbia/Harlem in
the April of '68 is just as important as what
happened in Hay Market Square— but at the
same time no more important.

understood at once that was was needed was a metropoli
tan police force equipped both militarily and politically for
urban counter-insurgency.

1968

(Confidence reappeared with Columbia and France, and
then took an important turn with Chicago.

Columbia : (1) Conclusively, students have severely li-
mited but formidable power to intervene in certain pro-
cesses of oppression and to compel certain institutional
reforms. (2) A practical alliance between blacks and whites
became a concrete fact for the first time since Selma. The
campus continues to be the main current locus of this
alliance. (I say this, obviously, in view of Columbia’s subse-
quence: Columbia’s innovations proved repeatable else-
where.) (3) Production relations constitute the life of class
economy; distribution relations constitute the life of class
society; consumption relations constitute the life of class
politics. The stormed or barricaded factory gate of classical
revolutionary vision is not the definitive image of any
“final” or “pure” proletarian consciousness. The struggle at
the point of production, when it occurs, is merely one
expression of a more general struggle which, much more
often than not, is ignited and fed by consciousness of
inequities of consumption.*

*'7/2 eighteenth-century England the manufacturing work-
ers , miners , and others , were far more conscious of being
exploited by the agrarian capitalists and middle-men , as
consumers , than by their petty employers through wage-
labour; and in this country [England] today consumer and
cultural exploitation are quite as evident as is exploitation
' at the point of production * and perhaps are more likely to
explode into political consciousness.” E,P. Thompson , “The
Peculiarities of the English The Socialist Register, 1965
(London), Ralph Miliband and John Saville , eds. t p. 355 .

The worker comprehends the factory, in fact, as his means
of consumption. It’s in distribution patterns that the life
styles of the class hierarchy are imposed; in the consump-
tion patterns thus produced that the hierarchy of classes is
most immediately lived. Production relations, as they are
actually lived, are usually politically neutral: the difference
between an 8-hour day under U.S . capitalism and a 16-hour
day under Cuban socialism is hardly to the former's advan-
tage. In fact, it’s much more often a failure in the distrib-
utive or consumptive functions that creates political trouble
for capitalism. How to finance further expansion? How to
empty these bursting warehouses? And it could even be
argued that as between the ghetto rising and the militant
strike in heavy industry, the former is closer to that
famous “seizure of State power” than the latter is. But
why try to choose at all? We are dealing here only with
aspects of a unitary complex, not with elements of a
compound, and the tendencies of a method of analysis to
reproduce reality as a set of correlative abstractions should
never be permitted to reduce aspects of a continuous social
process to the elements of its model. What happened at
Columbia/Harlem in the spring of ’68 is just as important,
just as pregnant and portentious, as what happened in
Haymarket Square— but at the same time, no more import-
ant either. We have littered contemporary American history
with a hundred aspiring preludes whose aggregate current
meaning is precisely the fight for the last word about their
meaning, but whose future denouement is not yet revealed
to us. To make the point still more explicit: There is no
such thing as a model revolution (or even if you think you
have found such a thing in la Revolution francaise p note
that it materialized considerably in advance of the theory
that hailed it as such), and there is no revolutionary theory

August-September, 1969

by means of which right and wrong sites of organization
and agitation can be discriminated. The function of analysis
is to clarify reality, not to pass judgment on it.

A few other points about Columbia: (4) “Co-optation”
is obviously a useful concept. It warns you against being
hoodwinked by those who’ve learned to smile and smile
and still be villains. Unfortunately, just beyond that point
at which it remains useful, it flops over completely and
becomes disastrous: it can become a no-win concept mas-
querading either as tactical cunning or strategic wisdom. It
instructs people to reject what their fight has made possible
on the grounds that it falls short of what they wanted. If
the Left allows its provisional victories to be reaped by the
Center-Left, trust that those victories will very promptly
be turned into most unprovisional setbacks. Am I saying
that we should sometimes have people “working within the
system’s institutions?” Precisely, emphatically, and without
the slightest hesitation! You are co-opted when the adver-
sary puts his goals on your power; you are not co-opted
when your power allows you to exploit his means (or
contradictions) in behalf of your goals.

(5) The SF State strike retrospectively clarified one dif-
ficulty, maybe a shortcoming, of the Columbia strike.
Other BSU-SDS-type eruptions suffered from the same
lapse. Namely: We very badly need a clear , sharp formula-
tion of the white interest in overcoming racism . All of us
feeL that this “ whit e-ski n-privilege” —if it is even a privilege
at all— costs us something, and that the cost exceeds the
gain. Yet we’ve had difficulty making it clear why we feel
this way, and for the most part in the hurry of the
moment have simply had to abandon the attempt, opting
either for a purely moralistic explanation (which has meant

that the white base of the strike is not represented in the
strike leadership committee) or for the adding on of “white
demands” (which tended to obscure the specifically anti-
racist character of the action). Neither approach is any
good. It is wrong for the base of the movement, any
action, not to have a voice in tactical and strategic policy-
witness, for one thing, the general bewilderment of the
white SF State students who, when the strike was over,
had little to do but return to business-as-usual classrooms.
It is also wrong, or at least not quite right, for whites to
demand “open admissions for all working-class youth” at
the same time that the same whites are (a) trying to help
make a point about the racist nature of colleges, and
(b) attacking the content of the basic college education on
the grounds that it’s a brainwash. The German SDS idea of
the critical university, somehow adapted to our particular
political objectives, might break through the current di-
lemma at the level of program. But especially since the
dilemma may shortly materialize in noncampus settings, it’s
first necessary to break it at a theoretical or general level.
Why does racism hurt whites? Or which whites does it
hurt, and why and how?

France , the May Days : “The revolt of the students is
the revolt of the forces of modern production as a whole,”
writes Andre Glucksmann, a leading theoretician of the
March 22 Movement. This intriguing formulation, like all
new-working-class theorizing, is at bottom nothing but an
attempt to find a new face for the old Leninist mask: Only
“workers” can make 20th Century revolutions, so those
who are creating a big revolution-sized fuss, even if they
come outfitted with a few electrifying Sartrean neologisms,
must therefore be some new kind of workers. I think this

Liberation

9

souped-up “New Left” scholasticism is worse than the Old
Orthodoxy. Any common-sensical reading of the Glucks-
mann map would lead the revolution-watcher straight to
the faculties of administration, technology and applied
sciences, since it’s within the meanings of the New Tech-
nology that these “forces of modern production as a
whole” are being visualized. Maybe at Nanterre, where the
fuse was lit. But certainly not at the Sorbonne or any-
where else in Paris, where the student base of the revolt,
just as in the United States, came out of the faculties of
liberal arts and the social sciences. Quite contrary to
Glucksmann, the revolt of the students is the revolt against
the forces of modern production as a whole— a fact which
would doubtless be apparent to everyone if it weren’t for
th e in tellectual tyranny of Marxism-Leninism.

"jfhe more tradition-minded Leftists scarcely did any
better with this out-of-no where avalanche. Not for one
moment having imagined it was about to happen, insisting
on the contrary that nothing like it ever could happen, and
having finally satisfied themselves that all their curses and
spells couldn’t make it go away, the Old Crowd FCP
determined to see in this Almost-Revolution a conclusive
vindication of their theories, practices and political rheuma-
tism all combined. “Behold, Lenin lives!” cried the Stalin-
ists of France, even as they bent their every effort to
killing him again.

The main fact about the Almost-Revolution is that it
was almost a revolution, not that it was almost a revolu-
tion. As parched for victories as the Western Left has been
in the post-war period, it may be forgiven its ecstasy at
scoring a few runs. But what are we left with? No ques-
tions, Pompidou is not the only or the main or even a very
important result of the May Days; as a minimum, the
feudalism of the French academy has been jolted, and
maybe it’s still a big deal in the 7th decade of the 20th
century to give academic feudalism a jolt. But it seems to
me that all the lessons people are claiming to have learned
are not lessons at all, only so many brute-force misreadings
of the event. To claim that the student foco was a worker
“detonator” is to dodge the awful question of the van-
guard, not to face it and overcome it, and besides that, it
tortures a meaning into “student” that has nothing to do
with the students’ evident meanings. On the other hand,
the claim that the old problem of the “worker-student
alliance” has found here the possibility of its solution
seems to me the very opposite of what the facts indicate:
Under propitious, even ideal circumstances, with the State
isolated and virtually dumb before the crisis, with DeGaulle
offering nothing more spiritual than an old man’s resent-
ment or more concrete than a diluted form of the students’
program, with the army out-flanked politically and the
police widely disgraced, with production mired in fiscal
doldrums, the industrial workforce caught with a deep
unease and its bureaucratized leadership dozing, it still
proved hard for students and young workers to make
contact, and (so it now seems) all but impossible for them to
forge a lasting and organic revolutionary union.

It seems to me that the following are more defensible

“lessons.”

1. No key West European nation (Britain, France, Ger-
many, Italy) can slide hard to the Left unless a Warsaw
Pact nation can also slide equally hard to the right. France
and Czechoslovakia constitute the gigue and the saraband
of an unfinished political suite.

2. We’re in a period in which, for the first time in
modern history, the social base of a truly post-industrial
socialism is being produced, delta-like, outside capitalism’s
institutional reach. (That is, a socialism which rejects capi-
talism because of its successes instead of its failures, and
which comes into existence in order to supercede and
surpass industrial society, not to create it.) But for long
time within the capitalist state, and for much longer within
the capitalist empires, this new base will coexist with the
old: that which wants to go beyond will coexist with that
which needs to come abreast. This constitutes the protrac-
tedly transitional nature of the current period, a source
both of confusion and opportunity within the world Left
community, and above all a problem which the advanced-
nation Left will have to solve by means of a post-Leninist
theory and a post-Leninist practice.

Chicago : (1) Liberalism has no power in this country.
It is not politically organized. The few secondary institu-
tions in which it lives its hand-tomouth existence are, at
best, nothing more than insecure and defenseless sanctuar-
ies. In none of the estates— not the church, not the media,
not the schools— does it exhibit the least aggressiveness, the
least staying power, the least confidence. This country , in
the current situation , is absolutely impotent before the
threat of what Fulbright has lately called “ elective
fascism ”

^’11 admit that this discovery surprised me. I had thought
that the liberals had a little crunch left. McCarthy had
always obviously been an icecube in an oven; but even
deprived of Kennedy, I had supposed that the liberals
would have been able to drive a few more bargains. They
were helpless at Chicago, and their helplessness has only
deepened since then. (Observe the sorry spectacle of Yan-
keedom’s main gunslingers, Harriman, Vance, and Clifford,
vainly trying to ambush Nixon, who knows and impertur-
bably defeats their every confused move.)

For the very simple truth about Chicago is that Daley got
away with it, and there was nothing anybody could do.
What “Big Contributor” dropped a word to the wise
against him? What “Key Party High-up” moved even to
censure him behind the scenes or slow him down? The
institutional mass of the society is either neutralized or
passively or actively supportive of reaction, and reaction
can go, quite simply, as far as it determines it needs to go.
Screaming their heads off at both the infant Left and the
entrenched Right, liberals have neither base nor privilege,
neither an organized following nor access to the levers of
power. This is important.

(2) If only because it sharpens the melodrama, we may
as well pinpoint Chicago, August, as the place and time of
the “mass line’s” formal debut: an unforgettable lit-up

10

August-Sept ember, 1969

Chicago occasioned these two terminal movements; the humiliation of liberalism and the "official"
reversion of SDS to a Marxist-Leninist worldview.

nighttime scene, Mike Klonsky taking the bullhorn at Grant
Park to harangue the assembly about its “reformist” poli-
tics.

I’ve already indicated that I see nothing promising in
any version of Marxixm- Leninism— not PL’s, not that of the
now-defunct “national collective” of the Klonsky-Coleman
period or of its apparent successor, the Revolutionary
Union, and not that of the more diffuse and momentarily
hazier grouping, the Revolutionary Youth Movement. But
of course I don’t claim that a mere statement of this view
constitutes either an explanation of it or an argument for
it. The argument will have to be made, very carefully, in
another place, and I have to confine myself here to the
observation that any revolutionary movement will all but
inevitably adapt itself to Marxism-Leninism— or the other
way around— because there is just no other totalizing phil-
osophy of revolution. This philosophy then enables a repre-
sentation of reality in something like the following general
terms: “A desire in pursuit of its means, a means in flight
from its destiny— these conditions constitute The Problem.
Solution: tomorrow, when history’s preplanted timebomb
at last goes off, blasting false consciousness away, the
words of the prophets will be fulfilled.”

Chicago, in any case, occasioned these two terminal
moments: the humiliation of liberalism, and the “official”
reversion of SDS to a Marxist-Leninist worldview.

1969

The leading events so far: The SF State strike and the
structurally similar conflicts that erupted across the coun-

try, the People’s Park showdown in June, the SDS conven-
tion, and the Black Panther call for the Oakland confer-
ence.

San Francisco State : I want to make just two observa-
tions on this much-studied event.

First, the movement’s characteristic attitude toward par-
tial victories— more particularly, toward what is disparaged
as “student power”— is mechanistic. It appears that every
change which is not yet The Revolution is either to be
airily written off as no change at all, or further than that,
to be denounced as co-optation into the counter-revolution.
People should only try to remember that the SF State
strike did not materialize out of thin air, that it had a
background, that it was that particular moment’s culmina-
tion of a long conflictual process, and that just as with
Columbia, where political work had been sustained at a
generally intense level at least since May 1965, the explo-
sive strike at State was made possible, maybe even neces-
sary, by a long series of small moves forward, any one of
which could have been attacked as “bourgeois liberal re-
form.” More precisely, it was in large part those incre-
mental “reforms” of curriculum and student-teacher and
teacher-administration relationships carried out under the
unseeing eyes of President Summerskill that created the
general conditons in which the strike could take place. As
with Columbia, the atmosphere had long been thoroughly
politicized— that is to say, charged with consciousness of
national issues. And a long reign of liberalism had, in
effect, already legitimated the demands around which the
strike was fought through, just as a long reign of reformism
had created the institutional means of the strike. In the

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11

same way, the fact that the Third World Liberation Front
leadership did after all negotiate the “nonnegotiable” de-
mands, the further fact that this leadership then moved to
consolidate these bargaining-table victories within the
changing structure of the institution itself — this meanf not
that the fight was over, not at all that “capitalism” had
suffered a tactical defeat only to secure a strategic victory,
but rather that the stage was-and is— being set for another
round of conflict at a still higher level of consciousness
within a still wider circle of social involvement. For the net
result of the strike’s victories is still further to break down
the psychological, social, and political walls that had for-
merly sealed off the academy from the community. This is
a big part of what we are about-the levelling of all these
towers, the redistribution of all this ivory, the extroversion
of these sublimely introverted corporate monstrosities: and
not just because we have willed it, whether out of malice
or chagrin or a blazing sense of justice, but rather because
capital itself, in all its imperial majesty, has invested these
schools with its own trembling contradictions. Necessarily
demanding a mass consciousness of and for its techno-
logical and political ambitions, it necessarily produces a
mass consciousness of the servility of the first and the
brutality of the second. Necessarily demanding an army of
social managers, pacifiers of the labor force, it necessarily
produces an army of social problem solvers, agitators of
that same labor force. Necessarily demanding an increas-
ingly sophisticated corps of servicemen to the empire, it
necessarily produces a cosmopolitanism to which this em-
pire’s shame is its most conspicuous feature. Necessarily
demanding a priesthood to bless its work in the stolen
name of humanity, it necessarily produces the moral and
social weaponry of its own political condemnation.

vi/ play upon these stops. Not able to arrest this pro-
cess, as Reagan wants, nor to let it go forward, as the
liberals want, doomed to be blind in either this eye or the
other, not able to prosper without teaching us to serve it,
not able to teach us to serve without somehow teaching
us also its inner secrets, not able to teach us those secrets
without teaching us to despise it, capitalism in our time is
forced upon —forces upon itself - a choice of mortalities.
Either to continue that process whose most general form is
simply total urbanization, with its attendant destruction of
all the disciplinary taboos, of the family, of political reli-
gion, of nationalism, of property and the ethics of proper-
ty, of individualism and the entrepreneurial style; or to try
to reverse that process, in which case it destroys its fragile
equilibrium, destroys the social base and dynamic of produc-
tion and growth, puts on the airbrakes
and turns off its engines in midflight. If it makes the first
choice, it bursts like an egg: social control over the means of
education is necessarily only the prologue to social control of
the means of production , distribution , and consumption
If it makes the second choice, if it tries to freeze every-
thing, then the living thing, the life inside the egg, dies out;
a moment more, the shell collapses: Already a fascism in
its colonies , the empire is obliged nevertheless to hold its

fascism at a distance; and when protracted “wars of libera-
tion,” wherever they happen (ghettoes, campuses) and
whatever unpredicted form they take (e.g., Peru!), succeed
in driving this frontier fascism back upon its metropolitan
front, then the whole political and social basis of the
empire begins to fragment and dissolve. For a stable empire
can be military only in its means, not in its ends— its ends
necessarily being a mode of production, distribution, and
consumption; and the servicing of these ends ultimately
requires exactly that metropolitan class hegemony (all
classes passively accepting or even affirming the rule of the
dominant class, the class hierarchy having therefore the
firm structure of vertical consent) which fascism supplants
with class coercion*

One brief aside on a related matter: When I first met
white New Leftists about five years ago, their most com-
mon fear was that they were not a serious threat. Along
with this went the equally common belief that their ser-
iousness would be proved only if they were vigorously
attacked. (The current expression of this is the general view
that the ‘Vanguard” is whoever is being most vigorously
attacked: it is not the people who pick their leaders, but
the State.) No one suggested that the Other Side might be
holding less than a fistful of aces, that the adversary was not
super smart, that he might be stymied by his own contra-
dictions. Maybe it was my background that made
me skeptical-grandson of the south’s Last Peasant Pat-
riarch, sone of a first-generation migrant from a defeated
rural economy to the industrial revolution (Akron: smoke,
tires, factories, timeclocks, the permanently present mem-
ory of the “home” which you had abandoned in spite of
al wishes and had thereby, despite yourself, helped des-
troy, and which you could never go back to again no
matter how many rides you took those seven hundred
miles on hot jampacked Greyhound buses that, once below
Marietta, stopped every other mile to pick up or let off
still another coming or going hillbilly, suitcase in one hand,
baby in the other, eyes shot from whiskey and incompre-
hension. . . . Another time I must deal with this). I had
thought that there was precious little need to go out of
your way to provoke those distant people who worked on
Mahogany Row, lived in the mansions of Fairlawn, and
owned all the cops and politicians. If the vague people of
the vague middle were ignorant of how power worked and
who had it and who did not, we who lived just at the edge
of the black ghetto and whose lives were ordered by the
vicissitudes of production— cutbacks, layoffs, speedups,
doubles, strikes-were under no illusions. We knew their
viciousness because man, woman and child we had it for
constant companion. My mind was blown, its gfcars strip-
ped, to hear someone say that the gift of authenticity was
the Man’s to give, that it came in the form of clubbings and

*If the biography of German Nazism seems to contradict
this thesis . recall that Junker coercion was finally translated
into the hegemony of the State itself not mainly because
of risings in the colonies , but because of pressure from rival
imperialisms dating back at least to the First World War.

12

August-Sept ember, 1969

jailings, and that, left unprovoked, he might withhold it.
Not so: puruse your aims with stark simplicity and in all
peaceableness, put money in thy purse with the politest
and gentlest of smiles— trust him, he’ll get around to mak-
ing you pay, and anybody who does not know this just
hasn’t been paying attention.

So. That’s the first “observation”— the winning of a
“reform” isn’t always a bad business, and Leftists should
stop being scared of being reformed out of things to do.
The only real strategic necessity is to make sure the reform
in question reforms the power configuration so that it
becomes the basis for further and still more fundamental
challenges to class rule.

The second observation is connected. It has to do with
the question of what’s called (disparagingly) “student
power.” The formula attack on the making of demands for
such things as curriculum reform and greater student parti-
cipation in campus government goes like this: “The young
bourgeois, privileged already, exhibits here only his desire-
to extend his privileges still further. This desire must be
fought by radicals. If not exactly in the name of the
working class, we must see ourselves as fighting at least in
its behalf \ and since its interests are hardly served by the
abolition of grades or the reduction of required credits, we
must oppose such demands.”

pixst, the outlines of a speculation. What if the multiver-
sity is in some substantial part the creation of the ad-
vanced-world proletariat— not merely the plaything and mis-
tress of the imperialists? What if it is partly in the multi-
versity that the proletariat has banked and stored up its
enormous achievements in technology? What if the multi-
versity-the highest realization yet of the idea of mass
education and the rationalization of productive labor— is in
one of its leading aspects the institutional form through
which the proletariat continues its struggle for emancipa-
tion? Behind how many of these so-called “bourgeois”
children, one or two generations back, stands a father in a
blue collar, a mother in an apron? The proletariat, says
Marx, will have to prepare itself for self-government
through protracted struggle. What if this struggle is so
protracted that it actually must be seen as taking place, in
one of its aspects at least, across generations 4 ? The revolu-
tionary aspiration of whites in the 1930’s manifested itself
most sharply in factory struggles. In the 1960’s, that aspira-
tion has materialized most sharply on the campuses. What
have we made of this fact? The function of a method of
social analysis is not to reprimand reality for diverging
from its model, but on the contrary to discover in reality
the links and conjunctures that make history intelligible
and life accessible to effective action. An abstraction is not
something to stand behind like a pulpit but a lens to see
through more discerningly. Obvious? Then it is high time
to confess: At the same time that it has been trying so
desperately to live forwards, the New Left everywhere, in
West Europe as well as here, has been just as desperately
trying to think backwards. If Marxism is any good, and if
we can prove it worthy of the moment, then we ought to
be able to say what it is about contemporary relations of

production that makes the campuses a primary site of
contemporary revolutionary motion. Only when that ques-
tion is answered will we have any right to pontificate about
“correct” and “incorrect” lines, and it has not yet been
answered. Meanwhile, even if it is good and sufficient, as I
am almost sure it is not, to characterize “student power”
as a fight for “burgeois privilege,” we would still have to
ask: What kind of privilege? Assuming that there is nothing
here at all but an intra-class struggle against the contempt-
uous indifference of institutions, against the mindless blath-
er of the dons, the deans, the sycophants and the liars,
against authority in particular and authoritarianism on prin-
ciple, we would still have to say that the political balance
of this struggle is progressive and portentous . To those who
tell me that this fight neither equals, approximates, init-
iates, nor reveals the form of The Revolution Itself, I
answer first, Neither did Nanterre, neither did Watts, nei-
ther did anything else in man’s social history but a bare
handful of uniquely definitive and epochal convulsions,
each one of which moreover appeared only at the end of a
painfully long train of indeterminate events which escaped
their ambiguity only thanks to the denouement; and I
answer second, If you are trying to tell me you know
already what The Revolution Itself will look like, you are
either a charlatan or a fool. We have no scenario .

^econd, for what it’s worth to a movement suddenly
infatuated with the words of the prophets, Lenin faced a
somewhat similar question in 1908 when certain radicals
refused to support an all-Russia student strike on the
grounds that “the platform of the strike is an academic
one” which “cannot unite the students for an active
struggle on a broad front.” Lenin objected: “Such an
argument is radically wrong. The revolutionary slogan— to
work towards coordinated political action of the students
and the proletariat-here ceases to be a live guidance for
many-sided militant agitation on a broadening base and
becomes a lifeless dogma, mechanically applied to different
stages of different forms of the movement.” Further: “For
this youth, a strike on a large scale ... is the beginning of a
political conflict, whether those engaged in the fight realize
it or not. Our job is to explain to the mass of ‘academic’
protesters the objective meaning of the conflict, to try and
make it consciously political.”

The People's Park : Those few SDSers, unfortunately
conspicuous this past year, who think Stalinism is more or
less right on, ought at least to have admitted that “social-
ism in one country” is not exactly the logical antithesis of
“socialism in one park.” But it was the Stalinists, both
pure and off-breed, who among all the Bay Area radicals
found it hardest to relate to the park before the attacks,
were most puzzled by the attack itself, and produced the
most opportunistic “support” in the aftermath. Mainly be-
cause these curious rumbles of the hip are so hard to focus
politically in terms of a mass-and-vanguard model, it’s hard
for people with old minds to figure out how to relate to
them. That fact may be the basis of a touching epitaph;
but a living politics for our period will have to understand
that “decadence” is as “decadence” does, that the “cultural

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13

revolution” is not merely a craven and self-serving substi-
tute for the “political” one, and that if the West has,
indeed, a leftwards destiny, then neither its particular ends
nor its modes of organization and action will be discovered
through archeology. My guess: People’s Park wa$ one
among many episodes of a religious revival movement-
exactly the kind of movement that has heralded every
major social convulsion in the United States— and as with
all such movements, its ulterior target, its enemy, is the
forces of the industrialization of culture. The difference
now is that the virtual consummation of the Industrial
Revolution, within the West , lends a credibility and rele-
vance to such a program that it formerly has not had. That
is: The anti-industrialism of early radicals like Blake and
Cobbett, though it was fully anti-capitalist, could confront
rampant capitalist industrial progress with nothing more
powerful than a retiring, improbably, defenseless nostalgia;
could argue against the system of “masters and slaves” only
in behalf of the older and no doubt mythical system,
allegedly medieval, of “masters and men.” Every time it
became a practical movement— whether revolutionary or
reformist— socialism had to put forward simply a more
rational version of the program of industrialization itself.
This is not an irony or tragedy of history, it’s just the
dialectics of historical process. That it has so far been
unsurpassable is in fact the essence of revolutionary social-
ism’s general isolation to the backwards countries, or put
differently, this limit merely expresses the wedding of rev-
olutionary socialism to anti-colonialism, and on the other
hand, its impotence in countries in which the industriali-
zation process has been carried forward effectively (how-
ever ruthlessly) by the bourgeoisie. The thesis of People’s
Park, rough as it may be to deal with both in terms of our
tradition and our current practical needs, is that the essen-
tially post-industrial revolution, embodied most fully but

still (we must suppose) very incompletely in the hip com-
munities, portends the historically most advanced develop-
ment for socialist consciousness.

“Most fully” because it goes beyond industrialization,
and in doing so, implies (much more than it has so far
realized) a genuinely New Man— just as new compared to
Industrial Man as Industrial Man was new in comparison to
the artisans and small farmers who foreran him.

But it would be useless just to approve of this cultural
revolution without being very clear about its terrible limits.
I see two limits. First: The “new values” (they are, of
course, very old) can claim to be subversive only of the
standing values of work, but not really of consumption,
there being nothing in the structure and precious little in
the texture of “hip leisure” that keeps it from being com-
mercially copied (deflated) and packaged. Thus, in effect,
the target of the attack detaches itself, refuses to defend
itself, and in offering itself as the apparent medium of the
attack is able (persuasively to all but the sharpest con-
sciousness) to pose as the “revolution’s” friend. There are a
thousand examples of this process, whose minimum result
is vastly to complicate the cultural critique, and which at
the other limit succeeds wholly in disarming it. The quiet-
ism of which the hip community is often accused may thus
be much less the result of a principled retreat to cosmology
than of its flat inability to confront commercialism with a
deeply nonnegotiable demand.

^econd, even though the new anarchism is morally
cosmopolitan— affirming in a rudimentary political way the
essential oneness of the human community— its values are
practical only within the Western (imperialist) cities, and
are far from being universally practical even there. So the
second and bigger problem the cultural revolution needs to
overcome is its lack of a concrete means of realizing its

ideal sympathy with those globally rural revolutionary
movements whose social program necessarily centers around
the need for industrialization, not the surpassing of it. A
solution of this problem would no doubt also solve the
first. This is why it’s so important to subject the cultural
revolution to a much more profound and critical analysis
than what has been produced so far. For the point at the
moment is not to be for or against the current reap-
pearance of anarchism. It will be necessary rather to
explicate its tradition (too many hippies think they are
saying brand new things) and then to try to see if the
balance of forces , has changed sufficiently that this old
movement for a cultural revolution against industrial soci-
ety has begun to acquire a power which it formerly has not
had.

r Jhe SDS Convention: I wasn’t there, never mind why.
At the last SDS thing I was at, the Austin NC, the
handwriting was already on the wall. Having determined
that SDS must become explicitly and organizationally
committed to its version of Marxism-Leninism, PL would
continue in its Trotskyist way of identifying organizations
with movements and would try to win more power in
SDS-that much was already clear in the spring. I didn’t
think, though, that PL people would force a split. As
fiercely indifferent to this country’s general culture as they
seem to be, I still thought they would understand a split as
contrary to their purposes and would therefore seek to
avoid it, even if that meant a momentary tactical retreat.
Either I was wrong, or PL misunderstood-and misplayed-
the situation.

J want to make just one point about the current
situation. What is wrong about PL is not its rigidity, its
“style,” its arrogance or anything like that. Its ideology is
wrong. And not just in the particulars of emphasis or
interpretation or application, but in its most fundamental
assumptions about the historical process. Someone else may
argue that PL’s Marxism-Leninism is a bad Marxism-
Leninism, and that is a view which can doubtless be
defended. But I see no prosperity in the approach that
merely wants to save Leninism from Milt Rosen here and
Jared Israel there. The problem is deeper and the task
much more demanding. It can be posed this way: Back-
wards as it is, o'Ur practice is more advanced than our
theory, and our theory therefore becomes an obstacle to
our practice— which is childish and schematic, not free and
real enough. The general adoption of some kind of
Marxism-Leninism by all vocal factions in SDS means,
certainly, that a long moment of intellectual suspense has
been resolved— but much less in response to experience
than to the pressure of the tradition . We have not pro-
duced even a general geosocial map of the United States as
a society— only as an empire. We have not sought in the
concrete historical experience of classes a rigorous explana-
tion of their acceptance of “cross-class” (Cold War) unity
but rather have employed a grossly simplified base-and-
superstructure model to explain away the fact that labor

does not appear to think what we think it ought to think.
We have taken a class to be a thing, not a process (or as
Ei\ Thompson called it five years ago, “a happening”),
and have imagined it to be bound, more or less, to behave
according to the “scientific laws” which govern the cate-
gory. Most generally, we have imported a very loose and
sometimes garbled theory of pre-industrial revolution, have
tightened it without really clarifying it, and are now in the
process of trying to superimpose that theory, thus reduced,
on our own very different situation. The RYM group does
not differ in this respect from PL, the Revolutionary Union,
or even YSA or ISC. All these groups, opportunistic
in widely varying degrees, claim to have the same ace in
the hole, and Lenin’s phrases (or what’s worse, the Chair-
man’s truistic maxims) are gnawed upon bv every tooth.

R

Dr a long time I was baffled. Last fall the word began
to reach me: It was being said that I had “bad politics.”
How could that be, I wondered, since I thought I had no
politics at all. But by winter I conceded the point: no
politics is the same as bad politics. So there followed a
time in which I experimented with only the “mass line.”
Could Klonsky and Coleman be right? It didn’t come to
much. My mind and my instincts only became adversaries.
By spring I had to deactivate, couldn’t function, had to
float. What I know now is that this did not happen to me
alone. On every quarter of the white Left, high and low,
the attempt to reduce the New Left’s inchoate vision to
the Old Left’s perfected remembrance has produced a layer
of bewilderment and demoralization which no cop with his
club or senator with his committee could ever have
induced. And my view of the split at the convention is that
it merely caps a series of changes which began at the East
Lansing convention in 1968, with the decision to counter
PL’s move on SDS by means of a political form-the “SDS
caucus,” i.e., a countervailing faction— which accepted
implicitly PL’s equation of the social movement with the
organizations that arise within it. What walked out of the
Coliseum was simply a larger version of 1968’s SDS caucus.
Certainly it had grown in awareness and self-definition over
the year; and knowing that bare opposition to PL is .no
very impressive gift to The Revolution, it had spurred itself
to produce an independent Marxist-Leninist analysis and at
least the semblance of a program. My unhappy wager is
that even in its RYM incarnation it remains a faction, that
it will continue last year’s practice of “struggling sharply”
against internal heresies, that it will remain in the vice of
the old illusions, that it will pay as little attention to what
is happening in the country and the world as its predeces-
sor regime did, and that whatever growth the movement
achieves will be inspite of * its rally cries and with indif-
ference to its strictures. Nor is there a lot that can be done
about this. The Western Left is perhaps in the midphase of
a long, deep transition, and there is no way for SDS to
protect itself from the consequences. They will have to be
lived out. Which does not mean there is nothing to do. It
means, rather, that any new initiatives will confront a
situation very heavily laden with obstacles and limits. It
isn’t 1963 anymore.

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15

The Panther Convention : It hasn't happened yet as I
write, and I have no idea what its outcome will be. But
certain doubts still need to be aired.

What’s good about the Panthers has been amply hailed
in the white Left: The Panthers have, in effect, done for
the black lumpen of the northern urban ghetto what SNCC,
years ago, did for the black serfs of the rural sduth-
individual despair, given a historical interpretation, is
turned into collective political anger. To the alternatives of
tomism, crime, and psychosis, SNCC in the country and
the Panthers in the town have added the idea of revolu-
tion— ant-racist, internationalist, and socialist.

But taken all in all— and for forcing historical reasons
this is truer of the Panthers than of SNCC of 1960-64— this
consciousness is a Word without Flesh, and that’s what’s got
the Panthers trapped in a blind alley from which the only
exits are either martyrdom or the “anti-fascist” popular
front which it is the apparent purpose of the July conven-
tion to organize. To put it another way: The Panthers did
not organize the ghetto, they only apostrophized it. So far
as I know, the breakfast-for-children program represents the
only serious attempt to relate concretely, practically,
broadly, and institutionally to the black urban community
as a whole. And it is very much to the point that the
Panthers have recently promoted the breakfast program as
their most characteristic political act— at approximately the
same moment that the super-militants are purged, the
public making of fierce faces greatly cooled, and the gun
no longer presented as the leading symbol of Panther
intentions.

This is all to the good, but it should have happened long
ago. There ought to be dozens of programs like the
breakfasts. Nothing else, in fact, gives stature, credibility,
and social meaning to the gun; for the ghetto, as such,
neither can be nor should be defended. Only when that
ghetto is being transformed, de-ghettoized, by the self-
organized activity of the people does its militant self-
defense become a real political possibility. I’m not saying
that social organization must always precede combat
organization. If ghetto blacks were like the sugar proletariat
of pre-revolutionary rural Cuba, and if the police were like
Cuba’s rural guard, then the opposite would likely be true.
Even so, even if there is a proper analogy to the July 26
Movement, what would follow if not the obligation not
merely to challenge the police, not merely to engage
militarily and escape alive, but in fact to defeat the police,
to prove to the people that the tyranny cannot impose its
will on the countryside by force? The essence of J-26
politics lies in its valid presupposition of a popular will for
social revolution and in its insight that it was mainly their
common-sensical skepticism about overcoming the state
military machine that held the people back.

With all respect for Cuba and the ardor of black
American militants, I fail to see in the caste ghetto of an
industrial city anything like a political replica of the
countryside of a one-crop colony. The presence in the
ghetto of the political gun meant a great many worthwhile,
even invaluable things. But crucial as it is, “Free Huey!” is

not by itself a social program or a revolutionary slogan.
The irony is that nothing but a real social program, and the
expanding base of involved, active, and conscious people
such a program alone could produce, would ever make
Huey Newton’s liberation even thinkable, never mind the
means.

“But of course this has all been seen by now.” Has it?
The current Panther move to establish a white base of
support does not persuade me that it has been understood.
The Panthers are in trouble not because they have no white
support , but because they have too little black support; not
because they have no white allies , but because , in the
virtual absence of a wide array of real activities , real social
programs in the black communities , there is nearly nothing
that white allies can do besides pass resolutions , send
lawyers , and raise bail

S° s will have to take its share of the blame for this.
Much more interested in shining with the borrowed light of
Panther charisma than in asking all the hard practical
questions, much more interested in laying out the meta-
physical maxims that identify the ‘Vanguard” than in
assuming real political responsibility, this SDS, which so
often chews its own tongue for being “petty bourgeois,”
most shamefully confesses its origins precisely when it tries
so vainly to transcend them in worship of “solidarity”
which really amounts to so much hero-worship. Bourgeois
is as bourgeois does. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao,
Chou, Ho, Giap, Fidel, Che, Fanon: which one plowed a
furrow, ran a punchpress, grew up hungry? That, in the
first place, ought to be that. Further, in the second place,
it is not lost causes, however heroic, or martyrs, however
fine, that our movement needs. It needs shrewd politicians
and concrete social programs. Not theoretical (really theo-
logical) proofs that The People Will Win in the End, but
tangible social achievements now. Not the defiance of a
small, isolated band of supercharged cadre who, knowing
they stand shoulder to shoulder with mankind itself, will
face repression with the inner peace of early Christians, but
a mounting fugue of attacks on political crime of all sorts,
on all fronts, at all levels of aspiration, from all sectors and
classes of the population, so that repression can never rest,
never find a fixed or predictable target. Humble example:
Yesterday’s New York Times carries a full-page political
ad— the American Institute of Architects, it seems, has
come out against the war. What will the Panther or the
SDS national office do? Send a wire? Make a phone call?
Investigate the possibility of a combined action? Try to
make two or three new friends in order to make a hundred
or a thousand later. I guess not. For the AIA is as
bourgeois as they come, awfully liberal , too. When even the
Oakland 7 and the Chicago 8 are suspect, what chance does
a lot of architects have? So the architects will never hear
what we have to say about the empire, about the houses
that are being built in Cuba, about what we take to be the
extent and causes of the present world crisis.

But this loss is presumably compensated by our clarity
about the “vanguard.” Clarity! Any close reading of the
RYM’s Weatherman statement will drive you blind. Some-

id

August-S ept ember, 1969

times the vanguard is the black ghetto community, some-
times only the Panthers, sometimes the Third World as a
whole, sometimes only the Vietnamese, and sometimes
apparently only the Lao Dong Party. Sometimes it is a
curiously Hegelian concept, referring vaguely to all earthly
manifestations of the spirit of revolution. At still other
times, it seems to be the fateful organ of that radicalized
industrial proletariat (USA) which has yet to make its Cold
War-era debut. Mostly, though, it’s the poor Panthers,
whose want of politics was never challenged by the few
SDSers who had access to their leaders; this appointment-
Vanguard to the People’s Revolution-being, presumably,
SDS’s to make— and one which is defended, moreover, in
terms of a so-called revolutionary strategy (see the Weather-
man statement) in which the United States is to experience
not a social revolution at the hands of its own people, but
a military defeat at the hands of twenty, thirty, many
Vietnams-plus a few Detroits.

ut perhaps the ghetto=colony analysis means that the
Detroits are already included in the category of Vietnams?
In that case, for all real political purposes, (North) Ameri-
can=white; and the historic role of these whites, their
“mission” in the many-sided fight for socialism, is most
basically just to be overcome. The authors of the Weather-
man statement are of course perfectly right in trying to
integrate what may appear to be decisive international
factors into a model scenario of domestic change. From no
viewpoint can an empire be treated as if it were a nation
state. But although they face this problem, they do not
overcome it. They might have said that the leading aspect
of the US industrial proletariat remains, classically, its
exploitation at the hands of US capital, and that it
therefore still embodies a momentarily stifled revolutionary
potential. Contrarily, they might have said that what we

have here is a giganticized “labor aristocracy who are quite
philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings
and in their outlook . . . [and who are] real channels of
reformism and chauvinism” (Lenin, Imperialism: The High -
est Stage of Capitalism ). On its face, neither view is silly,
but neither is one more satisfactory than the other.
Weatherman’s refusal to settle for one or the other seems
to me to express a realistic intuition ; but the problem is
not solved simply by asserting one theory here and the
other theory there. They cannot both be equally valid. I
think the difficulty is embedded in the method of analysis:
Weatherman takes class to be a thing rather than a process,
and consequently tries to treat class as if it were, in and of
itself, a definite political category . (That is, labor is fated
to be Left.) But Weatherman also has a certain level of
historical realism, and this realism always intervenes (hap-
pily) to obstruct the mostly theoretical impulse-a kind of
social Freudianism— to idealize labor, to strip it of its
historical “neurosis” by the simple and fraudulent expe-
dient of viewing its neurosis as merely superstructural. In
other words, Weatherman’s confusions and ambiguities stem
from a conflict between its model and its data, and it
comes close to escaping this dilemma only when it forgets
its static model of class for a moment, and gives freer rein
to its sense of history and process. At such moments, it
comes close to saying something really important, which I
would paraphrase, over-optimistically no doubt, thus: “The
labor force we are looking at today is not the one we’ll see
tomorrow, and the changes it will undergo have everything
to do with the totality of its current and forthcoming
experiences, which range all the way from the increasingly
sensed contradiction between the rhetoric of affluence and
the fact of hardship to the blood and money sacrifices it
will be asked to offer in the empire’s behalf.” But this
ought to be said up front, and it then ought to lead to the

most exhaustive analysis of the real, living forces that
impinge upon not just labor but the population as a whole.
Everytime something like this starts to happen. Weather-
man breaks off and reverts to its concealed paradox: the
vanguard of the US (Western would be better) revolution
will be those forces which most aggressively array them-
selves against the US, those forces, in other words, which
are most distant from white culture. Thus, cause becomes
agency : the living proof of a need for change— the Panthers,
the NLF, etc.— is defined as the political means of change;
an almost absent-minded abstraction converts white
America’s sickness into the remedy itself.

The most succinct case of this kind of bad reasoning
I’ve heard came at the end of a speech Bob Avakian made
at the Austin NC. The racism of white workers would have
to be broken, he said, because, when the revolution comes,
it will be led by blacks, whose leadership whites must
therefore be prepared to accept. If this were only an
unconsidered trifle, it would be pointless to snap it up, but
it appears to represent a serious, persistent, and growing
school of thought in the New Left. The problem with it is
just that it implies that there could be a revolution in the
absence of a profound radicalization of the white work-
ing class, in the absence of profound changes in the
political character of that class. What would make it
possible for white workers to revolt would also make it
possible— and necessary— for white workers to help lead that
revolt. The very idea of a white working class revolution
against capitalism that is, necessarily presupposes either
than racism will have been overcome or at least that the
conditions for that triumph will have been firmly estab-
lished. The problem with this dreamed-of revolution will
not be anti-blackism within its ranks, but the anti-
communism of its adversary. “In revolution, there are no
whites or blacks, only reds.”

But beyond this, Avakian (as with the Weathermen)
wants it both ways: blacks are a colony, on the one hand,
outside the colonizing political economy and set over

against it; and on the other hand, they are in and of the
empire’s proletariat. In the first mode, they press against
the empire from a position which is outside it in every
sense but the geographical. In the second mode, they press
upwards against the bourgeoisie from within capital’s sys-
tem of social classes. It is of course not impossible that

these modes really do coexist and interpenetrate one

another. In fact, it is likely that they do. But both modes
cannot be represented as simultaneously co-leading aspects
of the black situation vis-a-vis white society. A white

revolutionary strategy requires a decision as to which
aspect is dominant and which secondary, as well as an
understanding that what is dominant now may become
secondary later , may even disappear .

S °~ an attempt at a clarification (which, as with certain
other points I’ve tried to make in this letter. I’ll have to
elaborate and defend in some other, more ample space):

1. The persistence of integrationism, in a dozen dis-
guises, and nationalism’s struggle against it, make a strong
circumstantial case for the view that blacks are above all

18

blacks. They are not just another part of the workforce,
not even just the main body of the lumpenproletariat. Nor
do they make up a caste. Industrial societies do not have,
cannot afford, castes; castes belong to pre-capitalist forma-
tions (or, at latest, to agrarian capitalism) and are in fact
destroyed by the imperatives of industrial organization.

Obviously, blacks are assigned an important role in the
US production-consumption process. So were pre-
revolutionary Cubans. So are contemporary Venezuelans.
The low-skill aspect of black production and the import
tance of the credit and welfare systems in black consump-
tion constitute, in themselves, the leading features of a
colonial relation to a colonizing political economy. It is
therefore appropriate to see the black ghetto as a colony.
Thus, and true black nationalism (much “nationalist” rhe-
toric is merely a Hallowe’en mask for integrationist or even
comprador demands) is necessarily anti-imperialist, and
could consummate whatever military or political victories it
might achieve in the independence struggle only through a
socialist development of the means of production.

2. No more than the struggle of the Vietnamese can be
the struggle of the blacks to play a “vanguard” role in the
problematic revolution of white America. Vietnam and
Detroit , the NLF and the Panthers , do not constitute the
means of white America's liberation from imperialist capi-
tal They constitute, rather, the necessity of that liberation .
They exist for white America as the living embodiment of
problems which white America must solve. There are,
obviously, many other such problems: the draft, high taxes,
inflation, the whole array of ecological and environmental
maladies. Big Brotherism at all levels of government, the
general and advanced hypertrophy of the State, the frac-
tionalizing of the civil society. Most of these problems are
relatively diffuse; they are not experienced so acutely as
the war or the ghetto risings. But they are still real to
people, and they all have the same general source in the
hegemony of capitalism: What sets Vietnam aflame is the
same force that brutalizes the black population and poisons
everybody’s air.

3. The function of the white Western socialist is there-
fore, at this moment, to confront white America (white
France, etc.) with the truth about the problems that harass
it, to explain that these problems cannot be solved merely
by repressing those people in whose lives the problems are
embodied, cannot be solved by prayer or petition, and
above all that they cannot be solved so long as the means
of production, the wealth of that production, and the
monopoly of political power that goes with those means
and that wealth are locked up in the hands of the big
bourgeoisie. You would as wisely ask the bullet to sew up
the wound it made as ask the monopoly capitalist to solve
these problems. The capitalist cannot do it. But the
socialist can. That is the point we have to make.

4. The rebellion of white students is provoked most
fundamentally by the general extrinsic failure of capitalist
production— by the fact, that is, that production has become
so- conspicuously anti-social. This is what gives the student
rebellion both its power and its very real limits. But this

August-September, 1969

extrinsic collapse has not yet been followed by an intrinsic
collapse: the system of capitalist production is at the
moment both insane and rational If a failure of its
administration should produce also an intrinsic collapse— if
suddenly no one could buy and no one could sell— then the
people of the West would come again to the crossroads of
the 1930s, and would have to decide again whether they
would solve their problems by means of war or revolution.
It is at that point that the fight for the loyalty of the
proletariat will become truly historical instead of merely
theoretical, necessary instead of merely right, possible
instead of merely desireable. But no will, no courage , no
ingenuity can force this eventuality . If it develops, and if
the crisis is prolonged enough for white American workers
to grasp the need for revolution, then with the same
motion in which they change their rifles from one shoulder
to the other, they will simultaneously de-cobnize the
blacks, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the French— for at
such a moment, all the old paralyzing definitions will die
and new definitions, revolutionary ones, will take their
place. The world proletariat will have achieved, at last, its
dreamed-of world unity. This possibility, this towering
historical power, is merely the other side of what it means
to be a white American. But again: no matter how well it
is organized or how combative and brilliant its performance
is, no Western socialism has it in its power to force or even
to hasten the intrinsic collapse of capitalist production. If
you are an unreconstructed Marxist, you believe that it will
come about sooner or later; if, like myself, you are not,
then you don’t know. It could happen: the market seems
pale, inventories are large, the need to fight inflation in
behalf of the international position of the dollar may lead
to harder money, more unemployment, and still further
slippage in demand; and if Nixon does not get the ABM,
the whole system of the US Cold War economy will have
received an ominous if mainly symbolic jolt. My view is
that if this process starts unfolding, labor will have scant
need of student organizers, and in the second place, that it
will actively seek the support of student radicals. The
“worker-student alliance” will happen when workers want
it to happen, they will want it when they need it, and they
will need it when and if the system starts coming apart. At
such a conjuncture, students will have a critical contributon
to make no matter what happens between now and then;
but their contribution will be all the greater if they will
have employed this uncertain threshold period to secure
some kind of power base in the universities and such other
institutions as they can reach, and if they will have used
the opportunities of their situation to take the case for
socialism to the country as a whole, aware certainly that
class implies a political signature, but just as aware that it
does not necessitate one. It is mainly to the extent that the
white movement has done just this, in fact, that it has been
of some occasional concrete service to the black movement,
and the same will be true of any forthcoming relationship
with a self-radicalized labor force.

I M me put this more bluntly. We are not now free to
fight The Revolution except in fantasy. This is not a limit

we can presently transcend; it is set by the over-all
situation, and it will only be lifted by a real breakdown
within the system of production. Nor will the lifting of the
limit be the end of our fight; it will be just the possibility
of its beginning. Meanwhile, there is no point in posing
ourselves problems which we cannot solve, especially when
the agony of doing so means, in effect, the abandoning or
humbler projects-“humbler”! ... as tor example, the
capture of real power in the university system-which
might otherwise have been brought to a successful head.
Just look: Very little, even insignificant effort was invested
in the idea of “student power,” and the SDS leadership
even debunked the concept as, of all things, “counter-
revolutionary.” Yet we have just witnessed a moment in
which a few key universities very nearly chose to collide
head-on with the State over the question of repression of
the Left. That would have been a momentous fight,
especially coming on the heels of the black campus insur-
gencies. It’s our fault that it didn’t happen. The fault may
be immense.

This was supposed to be about the future. Thousands of
words later, I have still said very little about the future.
I’m not really surprised at myself, and I won’t apologize,
but simply sum it up by saying that if SDS continues the
past year’s vanguarditis, then it, at least, will have precious
little future at all. For what this movement needs is a
swelling base, not a vanguard.

Or if a vanguard, then one which would rather ride a
horse than look it in the mouth. One which wants students
to get power and open up the campuses, blacks to win the
franchise and elect some mayors, architects to be against
the war and advertise that fact in the Times , clergy to be
concerned and preach heretical sermons* inductees to dodge
the draft and soldiers to organize a serviceman’s union,
workers to have more pay and shorter hours, hippies to
make parks on private property, liberals to defeat the
ABM, West Europe to escape NATO, East Europe the
Warsaw Pact, and the global south the Western empires—
and the American people as a whole (by any means
necessary!) to be free enough to face their genocidal past
for what it was, their bloody present for what it portends,
and their future for that time of general human prosperity
and gladness which they have the unique power to turn it
into. And for being still more “revolutionary” than this
implies, let us confess that time alone will tell us what they
might mean.

Carl Oglesby is a former president of SDS and co-author
of Containment and Change.

Coming:

John McDermott

establishment critics
on Vietnam

Liberation

19

A New Sensibility Rooted in Rebellion

Jack Newfield

Courtesv of Associated American Artists

ihere are three separate but related
movements whose gains or setbacks
over the next five years are important
to me. One is the radical (not neces-
sarily revolutionary) political opposi-
tion movement developing in this
country, (by this I mean much more
than just SDS or the New Left), in-
cluding a variety of extra-parliamentary
insurgencies, many of which are single
issue and reformist; the strike of black
hospital workers in Charleston; draft
resistance; the grape strike; the move-
ments among Mexicans and Puerto
Ricans; the community control move-
ments in the ghettoes; the GI organiz-
ing movement; and the growing revolt
of intellectuals against the institutions
of the military-industrial complex; as
well as the Panthers, the ad hoc cam-
pus revolts, and the full range of anti-
war activities.

The second movement whose
growth concerns me is the cultural

revolution in this country— the move-
ment to create new life styles, new
institutions, new communities. By this
I mean rock music, Rat, Newsreel,
hippie communes, the drug sub-
cultures, street theatre, film experi-
menters, McLuhan, Ginsberg, Phil
Ochs, Dylan, the Stones and Joe Hel-
ler; a whole new sensibility rooted in
community, sensuality, rebellion, and a
sense of the absurd.

The third movement is the interna-
tionalist drive against white, Western
colonialism from Vietnam to Latin
America to Angola.

a.

now see several historical trends
emerging that make me pessimistic , in
the short run about the first two of
these movements. The most depressing
trend is the atrophy of the old liberal-
ism. It is now a cliche in the mass
media that the country is rapidly be-

coming more conservative. I think that
this is not so. What is happening is
that liberalism is becoming more con-
servative . It is liberals who have been
responsible for the Vietnam war— JFK,
Humphrey, Bundy, Fortas, McNamara;
liberals in the unions and party struc-
ture (Carl Stokes, Bayard Rustin,
Adlai Stevenson, Gus Tyler, Fred Har-
ris) who sponsored Humphrey’s nomi-
nation in Chicago; liberals who
opposed the open admissions policy
for CCNY (Lindsay, Wagner, Badillo,
Scheuer); and liberals who have so far
refused to stand up against Nixon’s
New McCarthy ism— the Chicago indict-
ments, the roundups of the Panthers,
the police violence at Berkeley, the
Congressional paranoia about SDS. The
liberals seem willing to pay the ransom
of a little repression in order to get the
Movement off their backs. It is Edith
Green, RFK’s manager in Oregon, who
is sponsoring the anti-student bill in
the House.

7^. other developments make me
temporarily pessimistic. One is the
Movement’s own penchant for elitist
bullshit. The Crazies breaking up meet-
ings of I.F. Stone and Norman Mailer
only turns sensible people off. Ditto
the Living Theatre disrupting Paul
Goodman. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry
Rubin calling Sirhan Sirhan a “freedom
fighter” will not radicalize the Ken-
nedy and McCarthy activists, and call-
ing all cops “pigs” will not humanize
them, either. The Movement has to
reach out more. PL’s attempts to use
and take over SDS do not further a
humanistic and democratic movement.
These trends need to be combated
without red-baiting and I was impres-
sed by Staughton’s piece in the June
Liberation, as well as by Bob Scheer’s
essay in the July Ramparts,

There is no revolutionary situation

20

August-September, 1969

in America today. To act like there is
is to invite a police state. PL suffers
from a malnutrition of reality. Their,
strategy can' get some very good people
killed. It is counter-revolutionary,
counter-productive. It is hostile to the
cultural revolution beginning in the
United States. It is, in both theory and
practice, anti-democratic.

The rising racism of the white work-
ing class I would identify as the third
negative trend. Despite the events in
Paris last spring, and mounds of SDS
literature I have read, I see little evi-
dence that white workers in America
are immediate allies of a radical move-
ment (I cannot see the Teamsters
liberating a building in sympathy with
a Black Student Union). The elections
this spring in Los Angeles, Minneapolis
and New York underscore this prob-
lem. The factory workers, cops, secre-
taries, steelworkers— the Wallace
constituency-have legitimate fears and
frustrations. I think we can talk use-
fully to them about specific issues-
powerlessness, tax reform, hypocrisy of
liberal politicians, aid to parochial
schools, bigness and bureaucracy. But I
think it is a debilitating delusion to
expect they can be quickly, or easily
recruited into a revolution led by
blacks who want their jobs, and by
pot-smoking, long-haired students.

^et I think there are hopeful cur-
rents on the margins of the society
that make me optimistic , in the long
run , about the eventual fate of the
political, cultural and international
movements I cited at the start of this
piece.

Things will begin to get better if we
survive the next four to eight years of
Nixon. We will win important battles,
the consciousness of masses of people
will begin to change; the Movement— in
some form-will become a serious alter-
native in this country. But barring a
total economic collapse* or a war, I
can’t see a revolution. The government
just has too great a monopoly on
violence, and the people are just too
satisfied. The Movement will have to
dig in for the long haul; decades of
boring, gruelling work in communities.
Being a radical here will be neither
easy nor satisfying, since we are living

in the eye of the octopus. But patience
is imperative.

Rt of my long range hopefulness
derives from my agreement with the
fundamental assumptions and myths of
the Movement. The country is in crisis.
Youth is a new class in post-industrial
society. Wealth, property and income
are unequally distributed. America is
rotted and doomed. Traditional liberal
institutions (UFT, Harvard, Reform
Democrats, Peace Corps, New York
Post , OEO) cannot solve basic social
problems. And each year, the high
schools turn out a greater percentage
of rebels and activists, heads and seek-
ers. The young will be a permanent
and increasing constituency for radical-
ism. And if we can build new radical
institutions and communities (publica-
tions, movements, projects, new univer-
sities, organizations) they will not be
so vulnerable to economic reprisal and
political repression as the Left was in
the 1950s. Biology and time are on the
side of the Movement. As Hayden
often says, “We will not bury you; we
will just out-live you.” We will get
even with Sidney Hook through his
children.

The anti-colonial movements will
probably grow as time passes, although
I am hardly an expert in this area. But
I am confident that the NLF will win
in Vietnam. Nelson Rockefeller’s tour
of Latin America underscores the deep
discontent there. These movements in
the Third World will give increased
legitimacy to those inside America who
wrote and worked for the liquidation
of the American Empire.

The cultural revolution is slowly
gathering momentum, reaching more
and younger heads all the time. Rock
and pop musicians like Dylan, Jagger,
Lennon, Ochs and Zappa will become
recognized as the most representative
voices of this generation, just as F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salin-
ger and Kerouac are now recognized as
the literary Zeitgeists of their time.
Records and juke boxes and FM radio
stations will continue to radicalize
kids. And the kids can’t be fooled by
exploitative commercial schlock. The
film Che has bombed. Up Tight was
also a flop. Just as schlock rock, like

Jay and the Americans and the Vanilla
Fudge, can’t compete with the Band
and the Doors. Politics, for the young,
may come out of the barrel of an
amplified speaker. And all the socio-
logical pre-conditions exist-affluence,
social mobility, the population explo-
sion-for the cultural movement to
continue to spread. This movement
may not be explicitly political , but it
is creating and strengthening new
values and new life styles all over the
country, in any city that has a record
store, in any high school that has an
underground newspaper.

When Grade Slick sings, “feed your
head,” or the Stones sing, “I can’t get
no satisfaction,” or Dylan sings, “I
ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no
more,” this gets inside more heads in
middle America than any theorist of
revolution. Sexual freedom, long hair,
pot, satire, tribalism, the breakdown of
censorship-these are the vessels of the
cultural revolution that Richard Nixon
cannot stop.

T C.

/ jet me summarize. The next few
years under Nixon, Mitchell and Laird
will be very difficult. There will be
harassment and repression; the liberals
won’t have enough balls to help much,
and the Movement’s own violent nuts
(or undercover police agents) will
probably give the liberals plenty of
excuses for their caution. But if we
survive this period, I think we have a
good chance to achieve significant
structural changes in the society. Time
will prove the Movement’s analysis of
corporate liberalism, the universities,
and Vietnam right. The older liberal's
lurch to the Right will fail, and they
will lose the allegiance of the best
young; who joins the YPSL or reads
Commentary any more? I believe the
social conditions that create radicals—
war, racism, hypocrisy, state violence,
bureacracy, Puritanism, repression-will
continue. And each day, more and
more young people in colleges, in high
schools, even in junior high schools,
will reach the point where they feel
they can no longer conform to illegiti-
mate authorities who brutalize the best
parts of their nature.

Jack Newfield writes for the Village
Voice.

Liberation

21

Beyond Old and New Left:

The Emergence of aThird Force

James Aronson

I speak of the needless destruction and waste of lives, efforts and ideals, of intramural frustration and anger,
and even of bitterness and hatred whose end product can only be division and impotence.

a the night of Lincoln’s birthday,
nine years ago, Louis E. Burnham, an
associate editor of the National Guard-
ian , stood at the lectern on a platform
in a small meeting room in New York.
He was in the midst of a Negro His-
tory Week lecture to a predominantly
black audience on “Emerging Africa,
and the Negro People’s Fight for Free-
dom.” Burnham was black, and while
this fact is not integral to this story, it
does have a bearing. His usually vibrant
voice was tired and his words were
slow. He said: “I know you get tired
of the continuing struggle sometimes.
We all do, but we must not despair, we
must not rest-too long. Tomorrow’s
new world beckons. Tomorrow belongs
to us.”

His voice faltered and he sat down
to rest. An hour later he was dead of a
heart attack in the emergency room of
the Polyclinic Hospital, in large part a
victim of years of struggle and years of
neglect of person. Burnham was 44, an
articulate and dynamic writer and
speaker with a magnetic personality.
He was on the threshold of making his
greatest contribution to the black free-
dom movement in the fullness of his
maturity.

At a memorial meeting for Burnham
two months later, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois,
then in his 93rd year, said: “I knew
Louis Burnham for 25 years. There are
many matters of which I might speak
concerning him-of the work he did; of
the work he was doing at the time of
his death; and of what he might have
done had he lived. Above all, none can
forget his honesty and utter sacrifice. I
speak, however, only of one matter

which seems to me of the greatest
moment. What I want to say has to do
with the saving of lives like that of
Louis Burnham; the stopping of the
vast and reckless waste which goes on
each year in this country and others,
and deprives the world of irreplaceable
help for the tasks which we have to
do.”

DuBois spoke of the delinquency of
the state, but even more of the delin-
quency of individuals in the radical
movement, of their lack of concern for
one another, of the failure of responsi-
bility of man to man. I chose this epi-
sode in the life of a burned-out young
black radical, and the words of a disci-
plined and sage historian and so-
ciologist whose life spanned almost a
century of the history of the world,
because I believe the warning DuBois
sought to sound still has not been
heeded.

Jn a sense, I have gone into the past
to make a projection into the future.
Projections in themselves are difficult
enough. For the radical movement to-
day a projection such as is set forth in
the title of this symposium is all but
impossible, given the lack of cohesion
within the movement and the absence
of clear analysis of the prevailing for-
ces in the country today. Prefer to it
as “the movement,” although I do not
believe that a movement in an organiz-
ed sense exists. In this framework, a
more appropriate question might be:
“Where will the movement be five or
ten years from now, unless . . . ?” My
comments here will be less a projection
and more an expression of some deep-

ly held convictions and impressions
based on thirty years of involvement in
efforts to help present a radical alter-
native for the United States.

The word ‘"unless” encompasses a
feeling not of despair but of dismay
over the present state of the movement
and particularly the human exchange
among members of the movement. I
speak of the needless destruction and
waste of lives, efforts and ideals, of in-
tramural frustration and anger, and
even of bitterness and hatred whose
end product can only be division and
impotence. In this time of continuing
political, social and economic crisis, I
would venture this projection: Unless
the state of mind of the radical move-
ment can be oriented wholeheartedly
toward the philosophy and achieve-
ment of humanist socialism, within the
American experience and requirement,
and evei mindful of the movement’s
relationship to the struggle for libera-
tion everywhere in the world, five or
ten years hence the movement will be
precisely where it is today— sporadi-
cally and courageously successful in
focusing national attention on the key
problems of our time, but essentially
unable to extend its influence beyond
the righteous walls of its own making.

This dismay has been deepened in
the days before this was written by the
mindless self-cleaving of the Students
for a Democratic Society at its conven-
tion in June in Chicago-an outcome
accurately (and I am sure reluctantly)
forecast by Staughton Lynd in the
June issue of Liberation. Even the
most sympathetic reports (the Guard-

22

August-September, 1969

ship, the movement needs symbols, my
name exists as a symbol. I think that’s
a good thing.”

I think that’s a poor thing. The
pressing need for the movement today
—much less five or ten years hence— is
neither righteousness nor symbols but
the introduction, teaching and training
of political, economic and psycho-
logical humanist socialism in prepara-
tion for what may be a life-and-death
struggle with the forces of inhumanity
that surround us. To permit inhuman-
ity to persist unchallenged in our own
ranks is the surest way to self-destruc-
tion.

One can welcome and applaud the
revolutionary formulations of the new
left as replacements for the reformist
formulations of the old left, while at
the same time deploring the romantic
rhetoric of revolution that permeates
much of the new left. It has, to my
mind, misled many young radicals, and
persons finding their way to radicalism,
into mistaking confrontation with re-
action as the final battle between
American imperialism and the Ameri-
can revolution. We are a far way from
this condition. The American power es-
tablishment is worried, but it is enor-
mously strong; the potential revolu-
tionary forces are not organized, and
those segments which are organized
have no viable socialist program for
America.

The main priority in building a re-
volutionary force is the creation of a
movement which does not as yet
exist-a movement comprised of di-
verse but cooperative elements, black
and white, Spanish-American, Puerto
Rican and Indian, poor farmers, organ-
ized workers, community councils,
working separately or together, young
and old, willing to accept a common
unity of purpose strong enough to
create a radical movement which can
be a force for radical change in the life
of the nation. Just as the gathering
power of an emerging American imper-
ialism did its utmost to destroy a re-
surgent New Deal spirit after World
War II, an entrenched American imper-
ialism will do its utmost to prevent a
movement from coming into being to-
day to project a revolutionary rather
than a reformist program. It will be as-

ian and Liberation News Service parti-
cularly) presented a canvas of hysteria
a nd bedlam that could only have
brought an exhilarating warmth to the
hearts of the counterinsurgency plan-
ners in Washington and their branch di-
visions throughout the country.

The ancient and foul-smelling Coli-
seum was filled with screams and
shouts and the chanting of slogans and
the raising of ikons to exorcise hereti-
cal devils; speakers degraded women as
sexual vessels in the image of the de-
bunkers of the Bolshevik Revolution
50 years ago; half a convention hall
was expelled by the other half in flag-

rant violation of a democratic constitu-
tion; there was apparently neither time
nor inclination nor, in the last analysis,
opportunity to discuss— much less for-
mulate— a course or a program to enlist
the support of fellow Americans to-
ward the urgent task of altering the
American system. And finally there
was an “election” to leadership of a
man of undoubted courage but much
less proven acumen and ability, who
acknowledged that he was a ‘'press-
created” leader whom the media had
made a “symbol of the new left.”
Then, accepting his media-created role,
he said: “The movement needs leader-

Liberation

23

sisted in its effort if any one group
seeks to impose its policy as the pre-
vailing one for a radical movement, in
the conviction that it is the only “cor-
rect'’ policy.

The history of the radical move-
ment in the United States, and in
many other countries, has been to a
great degree a history of foundering on
the rock of correctness. Developments
within the New Left in the last year de-
monstrate that it is clinging to the same
old left rock which it had condemned
and promised to shatter.

It is, for example, most unfortunate
that the Southern Students Organizing
Committee, a modest and hard-work-
ing group, should have been dissolved
into the SDS on the eve of the SDS’s
own probable disintegration as a useful
organization. The apparent reason was
that SSOC’s policies were not “rele-
vant” to the stated national goals of
SDS. The policies of SSOC, however,
were relevant to the requirements of
the South. With a cadence appropriate
to the South, SSOC was proceeding on
the basis of its understanding of its re-
gion and its people to seek solutions
for the region. It was tragic that it was
forced to yield to the demands of the
absentee landlord.

This episode points two ways for a
radical movement: (1) to a patient and
painstaking road to organization, or (2)
to wreckage on the familiar shoals of
ineffectual correctness. I do not believe
that there can be an overall “correct”
policy for a national radical movement
today except in the acknowledgement
of the overriding questions of race and

imperialist war. The first objective, it
seems to me, must be a working rela-
tionship among all groups and organi-
zations which are potential participants
in sucn a movement, with tolerance,
understanding and a knowledge of one
another’s problems and aspirations.
And, above all, a knowledge of history.

I am reminded of a remarkably
clear and prophetic commentary by
the late Paul Baran in a symposium on
“Cooperation on the Left” in the July
1950 issue of Monthly Review. Dis-
cussing the “manipulative ability” of
the American ruling class to sustain the
decline of radicalism in the United
States, he wrote:

There is hardly any room for
political cooperation on the Left
at the present moment because
there are no politics of the Left.
The time will perhaps come, pos-
sibly sooner than we think. But
just now the issues are ideologi-
cal, and ideological problems can-
not be solved by organizational
makeshifts . . . What is needed-
let us say it again and again— is
clarity, courage, patience, faith in
the spontaneity of rational and
socialist tendencies in society. At
the present historical moment in
our country— “better smaller but
better.”

, almost two decades later,
there is plenty of politics on the left,
and the slogan might well be “bigger
and be tter.” But Baran’s cautions
about clarity, courage, patience and
faith remain as valid as ever. Some of
these qualities can be achieved partly
through the study of history. It is a
pertinent and not at all condescending
question to ask how many radicals
have a sound knowledge of the history
of the radical movement in the United
States, of the Populists, Socialists and
Communists, the isolated pockets of
struggle through the McCarthy era?
What about the New Deal and the be-
ginnings of the Cold Wax? I was some-
what startled in conversation recently
with an activist in the black freedom
movement of the early 1960s, to hear
him say that the young black militants
today, for the most part in the 18-
year-old range, have almost no know-
ledge of the beginning of the student
black freedom movement in 1960 be-
cause that history is not being impart-
ed to them

What knowledge and understanding
is there of the cataclysmic events in-
volved in the Bolshevik Revolution and
the Chinese Revolution (there is more
appreciation of course of the Cuban
Revolution, since it was closer to hand
and had an immediate spiritual impact
on young people)? Would it not be
more profitable and useful for radicals
to seek to comprehend the struggles,
dissensions, betrayals and glorious
achievements of these revolutions,
rather than to wave little red books
and invoke chapter and verse of the

theoretical literature of Marx, Lenin,
Mao and Stalin, tracked down in tal-
mudic fashion to make a stunningly ir-
relevant point? The lessons of revolu-
tions achieved have far more value for
a radical movement than the romantic
rhetoric of slogans that have no bear-
ing on the conditions of our life.

There is validity to the theory of
the continuity of history. The past— its
positive achievements, mistakes, fail-
ures, victories— affect the present and,
together with the experiences of the
present, help chart the course of the
future. With such knowledge will come
more careful critiques of the nature
and direction of the radical upsurge of
the last decade; with such knowledge,
projections become meaningful weap-
ons in the struggle that lies ahead. It
can also be of great help— on both
sides— in bridging the gap between the
generations.

y^ttitudes toward the New Left
among the older generations in the ra-
dical movement— and this inevitably
takes a middle-class turn because the
radical movement of the 40s and 50s
was largely middle-class in nature— seem
to assume either of two forms:

(1) despair at the unwillingness of most
New Leftists to adopt a single set of
political and scientific ideas (as was the
fashion in their time), and a defensive
attitude toward New Leftists who, with
single-minded hostility, charge them
with responsibility for the “mess” that
was the legacy of the New Left. This is
coupled with disapproval of the new
“life-styles” involving sexual freedom,
marijuana and drugs and bizarre dress;

(2) an uncritical approval of the New
Left and young people in general because
“young people are the hope of the
future, and God knows we surely have
failed them.” This attitude is a
comforting one: It permits the older
generations to acknowledge that the
younger generation has made them
aware of the extent to which they have
given up the struggle; then, having made
this noble acknowledgment, to continue
to remain nobly aloof, except perhaps
for occasional financial support.

But there is a “third force” both in
the older and younger generations with
which I would associate myself. In this
group, the elders— some of them wisely

24

August-September, 1969

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saddened veterans of the New Deal,
others scarred victims of the McCarthy
era— refuse to regard themselves as use-
less or expendable, and have never de-
parted from the actual struggle. They
accept the new life-styles without en-
dorsing the use of drugs or the preva-
lence of pornographia as heralds of na-
tional liberation. They do not regard
themselves basically as culpable for the
state of the nation and the world to-
day, any more than they would charge
the present generation with culpability
if its efforts failed to bring about
change. Rather, they subscribe to the
theory of the continuity of history, re-
cognize their place in the continuing
struggle, concede past error as well as
take pride in accomplishment, and seek
to work with the younger generation,
heartened by the youthful surge to-
ward radicalism. They hope they may
be able to impart some useful know-
ledge on the basis of experience, even
as they learn from the experience of
the younger generation.

Among the younger generation, it
seems to me, the “third force” mani-
fests itself as a serious, earnest group
which finds pleasure and love in the
camaraderie of the common struggle,
rejects the bitterness and hatefulness of
many of their colleagues, and seeks to
understand the forces at work in our
society by partaking in honest intellec-
tual endeavor and the life experience
of the community. On the basis of this
understanding, they attempt to formu-

late programs and policies which may
attract their peers who do not as yet
have sufficient political and social un-
derstanding to join them. They do not
reject America: they reject the system
and the symbols of the American es-
tablishment. They do not wish to iso-
late themselves as a sect, yet know
they may for some time to come be
forced to suffer the slings and arrows
directed at a vulnerable minority.

They understand the problems of
the generation gap, but do not reject
dialogue between the generations to
ease the problems. They understand
the psychological problems of their
own generation— the seeking after idols,
the ego-drives, the frustrations and the
search for identity that often lead to a
dead-end— and they try to deal with
them in a spirit of fraternity.

They do not seek the destruction of
the university, but attempt to use the
incomparable facilities of the univer-
sity, and the guidance of faculty mem-
bers who share their hopes and aspira-
tions, to make of themselves better
radicals and ultimately better revolu-
tionaries. They do not have faith in
the electoral system on a national
scale, but understand that there is ut-
most relevance in the election of black
people to a board in a backwater Ala-
bama county which allocates and dis-
tributes food to hungry people.

They accept the division between
black and white as a necessary con-
commitant of the system which has

created the division in the first place,
realize that their role in the struggle
for black freedom is not to seek the
protective comfort of the umbrella of
the black community, but to work
with white persons in the difficult task
of helping them to understand their
stake in the struggle for black freedom.
They are willing to work with black
people on the basis of understanding
and, when the time is appropriate, to
join them in the common struggle.

Radicalism is our alternative for
America, young and old alike, and we
insist on the right-and the duty— to ar-
gue, plan and build for what Lynd
terms a “humane, democratic, libertar-
ian” society, without interference from
those in power. If there is inter-
ference— and there will be— we will re-
sist, but the resistance— if the move-
ment can be fashioned— will have the
support of numbers and the essential
solidarity of participants in a common
effort.

A national liberation movement—
which is what our movement must be
—will not develop easily and without
cost. Fifty years after the death of
John Brown, DuBois wrote in his biog-
raphy of the Old Man: “John Brown
taught us that the cheapest price to
pay for liberty is its cost today.”

Fifty years after DuBois wrote
those words, the cost remains un-
altered.

James Aronson was editor of the
National Guardian for many years .

Liberation

25

DREAM

Julius Lester

Courtesy of Magnum

we know as “the Movement” had its beginnings in
the late 1950s. In Afroamerica the beginning was the 1956
bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in which a twenty-six-
year-old minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. introduced non-
violent direct action as a means of attacking the problem of
racial discrimination. The bus boycott was a sharp departure in
political tactics for blacks. Until that time the
NAACP’s approach of using the apparatus of the system in
the attempt to make the system work had prevailed and
the NAACP had achieved a great victory in the 1954
Supreme Court school decision. The South’s reaction to the
Supreme Court ruling was summed up in the new rallying
©ry of the Confederacy- “The South Says Never!” And
Afroamerica watched black children being beaten as they
entered schools in Clinton, Tennessee, Brownsville, Texas
and Little Rock, Arkansas. In response, the Eisenhower
regime did so little that it amounted to nothing.

Jn America during this same period, similar tactics were
being used, as pacifists in New York, San Francisco and
other cities demonstrated against the testing of nuclear
weapons, the appropriation of monies for bomb shelters
and air raid drills in the schools. In other parts of America
a phenomenon known as the “beat generation” established
psychic liberation zones in New York, Denver, New
Orleans, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, saying that they
would not follow the “man in the gray flannel suit,” that
life did not consist of the balance in your bank account,
but in the values by which you lived.

None of us who were a part of those beginnings in the
Fifties could have then predicted the Sixties. The Sixties
represent one of the most fantastic compressions of poli-
tical ideas and action of any decade in American history.
(As Jim Morrison of The Doors has pointed out: “A
generation lasts only two or three years now.”) To go from

August-September ; 1969

sit-in demonstrations at lunch counters in the South to the
Black Panther Party, from pacifist demonstrations against
nuclear testing to a mass anti-war movement, from the
“beat generation” to a cultural revolution is a ten-year
journey almost beyond comprehension. Yet, this is the
journey which has been made.

It is a tragedy of the Sixties that too few of us know
the journey on which we have been. We refer to “the
movement” as if it were a political monolith. But what we
now call “the movement” bears little resemblence to what
we called “the movement” in 1963. In the early Sixties,
“the movement” consisted of SNCC, CORE and SCLC in
Afroamerica, SDS. various socialist groups ana peace groups
in America. At that time if one wanted to be a part of
“the movement” one affiliated himself with one of those
organizations.

Today, “the movement” is no longer an identifiable
political entity, but we still refer to it as if it were. It is
more a socio-political phenomenon encompassing prac-
tically all of Afroamerica and a good segment of the youth
of America. It is exemplified by the high school dropout
who knows why he’s not in school, the long-haired youth
whose life is lived in the streets, college students, SDS
organizers, winos, blacks in daishikis and blacks in suits and
blacks in black leather jackets and on and on and on.
Indeed, most of the people who now consider themselves
to be a part of “the movement” do not belong to any
organization. Instead, there are loose groupings of people
around the country who share a common outlook, com-
mon life-styles, and common aspirations.

What we refer to as “the movement” has become
increasingly broad and more varied, not only in terms of
the people who were involved, but in its aims. During the early
Sixties it was easy to know what was happening.
“SNCC has organizers in Mississippi. They are organizing
people to vote.” There was a political goal and a means of
reaching that goal. Yet, as “the movement” progressed, it
found that the problems it was confronting were more

complex than had first been recognized. And on another
level, “the movement” had the power to unleash more than
it consciously intended. Indeed, one action set off a chain
of other actions around the country. For example, the
1964 Mississippi Summer Project was designed to organize
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, to challenge the
Democratic Party delegation at the convention in Atlantic
City, and to focus the attention of the nation on the state
of Mississippi. All of these objectives were achieved, yet the
Summer Project served as the catalyst for other actions
that were not directly related to the desired objectives.
Thus, the results of the Summer Project can also include
the take-over of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus m
1965, the beginning of a black-white split in what was then
the “civil-rights movement,” the beginnings of an all-black
movement, which announced itself in 1966 with the cry of
Black Power. These side results of the Summer Project m
turn set off other actions.

r Jhings happened in the Sixties. We didn’t make them
happen as much as one action produced ten other actions
(but the progression was geometric) and we were swept
along with it. By the mid-Sixties, it was practically impos-
sible for an organization to adequately control and guide
actions which it initiated. And to tell the truth, we were so
excited seeing so much happen, that few tried to control or
direct what was happening. We were not concerned with
being conscious of the implications of what we were doing.
We were merely conscious of doing.

The nature of “the movement” underwent a subtle
change in the mid-sixties. Until 1964, ‘‘the movement” had
depended upon its own people to carry information from
place to place. Meetings were small; “movement” publica-
tions were few and people depended upon direct contact
with each other to keep informed and since there wfcfe
always a fair number of people in motion, this was not
difficult. However, with the Summer Project in 1964 and
the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, the

media became more and more prominent as the carriers of
“movement” information. (One of the reasons the Summer
Project came into being was an attempt to break the media
black-out on Mississippi.) It had always played an uncon-
scious role in “spreading the word.” A 14-year-old black
youth who watched sit-in demonstrators getting, beaten in
1960 via NBC was 19 at the time of the Watts Rebellion,
and he had been politicized by NBC, not by meetings,
rallies or “movement” propaganda. And a ten-year-old in
Detroit who witnessed Watts via NBC was more than ready
two years later. ‘The movement” took advantage of the
media’s new interest in it and began to consciously use and
eventually depend upon the media to be the agent for
information rather than upon its own people and organs.
And as “the movement” grew, it became so loose and
ill-defined in structure and constitutency that a press
conference was the most effective* way of communicating
with “the movement.”

The media was also the principle agent of information
for the cultural revolution, feeding itself and making news
about be-ins, love-ins, hippies, rock groups, drugs, etc., and
it took the Yippies to merge the cultural revolution with
the political movement via NBC. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry
Rubin consciously used the media to transmit concepts of
the cultural revolution and to direct those concepts toward
political ends. They made their attitude as much a part of
the information to be transmitted as their words and their
dress (which is also attitude). (Vito Battista, a Republican
legislator from New York, is a good Yippie. Chairman Mao
swimming the Yangtze shows knowledge of Yippieism.
Khruschev banging his shoe on the table at the UN is a
Yippie elder statesman.) Abbie and Jerry used NBC to
communicate with twelve-year-olds in suburbia, consciously
trying to give them concepts and models that would be an
alternative to those presented by their parents and teachers.

j^y the fall of 1966, “the movement”, which had once
been composed of a few political organizations, was becom-
ing a separate society, with its own newspapers, its own
life-style, its own morality. It became like a huge river with
people jumping in at every point along its banks. Those
who had been swimming in the river for several years
suddenly found themselves surrounded by hundreds of new
swimmers and while everyone admitted that there was a
communication gap between the young and their parents,
few recognized that there was a growing communication
gap within what we still called “the movement.” We used
the same words and thought we were talking about the
same things, but, in actuality, increasingly, we were not.
The political perspective of someone who has been in “the
movement” since 1960 (and how many are left?) was, of
necessity going to be different from that of one who
entered in 1968. The viewpoint of the former was not
necessarily superior to that of the latter, but the dif-
ferences between the two had to be recognized and under-
stood. The “movement” veteran had a sense of “move-
ment” history, having lived it. The “movement” neophyte
did not. As far as he was concerned, “the movement”
began when he became aware of it.

Because of the constantly changing nature of “the
movement”, because the constituency of “the movement”
was constantly changing, we needed, by 1966, a history of
the previous six years, so that each of us would have some
knowledge of where we had been, whether we had been
there or not (and no one had been everywhere). We still
need that history, only now it must cover almost a decade.
It is in our history that we learn who we are. It is in our
actions that we learn who we are. If either element is
missing, we become one-legged creatures on crutches, think-
ing that we are running simply because we’re in motion. I
speak to a college audience and casually mention the
Freedom Rides and suddenly realize that most of those
listening were between the ages of ten and fourteen when
John Lewis stumbled from a burning bus outside Anniston,
Alabama in 1961. They do not know what I know. (And
because I am older, I lack some of the insights they have
because they are younger.) The results of this become
painfully apparent when one sits in a meeting in 1969 and
finds himself participating in a 1966 discussion. The reason-
ing and the arguments are the same. Only the faces are
different. The question then becomes: does each generation
have to cover the same ground for itself or can the
knowledge of one generation be transferred to another?
Because a generation is now so brief, there must be a way.
‘The movement” today extends from the ninth grader just
entering high school to thirty-year-olds like myself to “old

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28

August-September , 1969

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men” like Staughton Lynd and Dave Dellinger and beyond.
We must not become alienated from each other.

One of the tasks which must be undertaken in the
Seventies is for those with the capability and experience to
recognize that it is their responsibility to write and analyze
our own very recent history. If this history is not written,
we will then leave the job to be done by liberal historians
(who have, in fact, begun) and the information which they
will transmit to the future will not be the story of
radicalism in the Sixties . Merely the liberal’s story of
radicalism in the Sixties. We of the sixties have suffered
because we do not know the history of radicalism prior^to
ourselves. And because we don’t, we see the increasing
factionalism among political organizations and it’s like the
re-playing of a Grade Z movie. Because we don’t even
know our own history, we see SDS and the Black Panther
Party repeating some of the mistakes SNCC made earlier in
the decade. All of this is unnecessary, but it is happening.
It will continue to happen as long as we do not know what
happened in the Sixties, and before.

‘The movement” is no longer what it was when SDS
issued the Port Huron statement or when the Jefferson
Airplane used to perform in Golden Gate Park. Today “the
movement” has several divisions, the most apparent being
the black-white one. Within both of these, there are
sub-divisions. Within the white movement, a division can be
loosely made between cultural and political orientations,
recognizing that there is, of course, an over-lapping be-
tween the two. This is a division between the “street
people” and those of a more traditional political orienta-
tion, e.g. SDS, PL P, SWP, etc. (Within the latter, there are
many divisions and factions, and seemingly more, God
forbid, on the horizon.)

y|/rthin the black movement, there is no clear-cut divi-
sion between the cultural and political, despite the insis-
tence of the Black Panther Party to the contrary. While the
Black Panther Party has national projection as the leading
organization within the black community, what is happen-

ing in the communities is contrary to this. Leadership
within the black movement is becoming more and more
localized. Just a few years ago, that leadership was national
in character, best exemplified by Stokely, Rap, and for a
period, the Black Panther Party. With the development of
strong local leadership, the nature of the black movement
is changing. People are being organized around practically
every conceivable issue and sometimes, from every con-
ceivable approach. Intense black-oriented education is going
on within communities and once more, news of what is
happening is being transmitted by word-of-mouth, not via
NBC. This period of internalization is the natural one to
follow the mass awakening which took place with the
pronouncement of Black Power from 1966-68. The black
movement is more alive now than it has ever been. It
simply isn’t visible on the six o’clock news, except when
14-year-old girls are murdered by cops in Omaha.

The one very clear division which does exist in the black
movement is between those who use a Marxist-Leninist
analysis (generally the Black Panther Party) and those who
use a “race” analysis. The Black Panther Party would say
that this is a political-cultural split, but many blacks from a
political background, i.e. involvement in “the movement”
pre-dating the BPP, reject both the Marxist approach and a
complete “race” analysis. One of the most influential
spokesmen for a new analysis based on black nationalism is
Harold Cruse. His book, The Crisis of the Negro Intel-
lectual and his recent article on Cleaver’s second book in
the New York Review of Books are excellent examples of a
new approach to black nationalism and the question of
revolution.

The Seventies will undoubtedly see an intensification of
struggle between black Marxist and black nationalist view-
points. Because Marxism does not concern itself with the
question of race, its relevance to the black struggle is
highly limited. Those who define the struggle as a class
struggle are using 19th century concepts of 19th century
conditions. Those who define it solely as a race struggle are
over-simplifying the realities of the last years of the Twentieth
Century. Sadly, the attempts by some blacks to
come to a new analysis of the black condition in America
and of America itself are being hindered by white radicals
who are only too happy to proclaim any black the all-Wise
Leader if he says that it is not a matter of race, but a class
struggle. This enables white radicals to avoid grappling with
the problem of racism, a white problem. Both white and
black Marxists make the remarkable assumption that if one
is a Marxist one is automatically not a racist. No. One
merely becomes a Marxist racist and racism under any
name smells as bad. A radical “cracker” is still a “cracker.”
If the white movement is to grow, there must be a
recognition of the fact that while racism proceeded from
capitalism, racism now has an independent existence.
Racism can exist within any economic system. The destruc-
tion of capitalism does not mean the automatic destruction
of racism and many blacks do not think that the destruc-
tion of racism can be delayed until after the revolution.
The question arises, but can racism be destroyed under

Liberation

29

capitalism? No, but that has to be the priority. The white
radical movement is infected with racism and any revolu-
tion proceeding from its ranks is going to have racism
within it. And if there is a socialist revolution which has
racism within it, there has been no revolution. Just a
change in economic systems. The failure of the Black
Panther Party and many white radicals to recognize this
takes the political movement back to the days of 1964. We
are not witnessing a radical coalition, but simply a new
form of integration. And it has been given its validity by
SDS and other white radicals, not by the black community.

There is a need for a new analysis. The quality of any
political movement can be no better than the quality of its
ideas and the way in which those ideas are expressed. A
political movement functions on the basis of revolutionary
concepts and revolutionary morality. In the past year, there
has been an alarming decline in the quality of concepts and
morality within the political movement. When a hyena has
been wounded, it will turn and eat its entrails. The political
movement which began in the late Fifties and came to

fruition in the Sixties had a clear concept of where it was
going and some idea of how to go there. Yet, the further it
went, the more aware it became of the complexities of the
problems and the less apparent were the solutions. The
more complex the problems appeared, the more the politi-
cal movement turned to solutions others had used with
success, namely, Marxism-Leninism. While these solutions
worked for other people, there was little questioning as to
what degree, if and how these solutions might work in
America. The ways in which Ho, Mao and Fidel each used
Marxism-Leninism in different ways to stfif their particular
problems was over-looked and the fact that they used
Marxism-Leninism became all important. The result has
been an ever-increasing factionalism within the political
movement, with each side saying it represents the one, true
approach and throwing epithets of “counter-revolutionary”

back and forth like the Chicago police throwing tear gas
cannisters. He who disagrees with me is counter-
revolutionary seems to be the current level of political
analysis and acumen. This not only creates dissension but
is demoralizing in the extreme.

The political movement has become so concerned with
itself that it has ceased to grow. In and of themselves,
organizations are very dangerous things. They are begun as
the vehicle for social change, for the revolution. After a
while, though, they unknowingly become mistaken for the
revolution itself. Organizations have to have offices, print-
ing equipment, mailing lists, etc., and generally, it seems
that the more the power structure moves against an
organization, the more it becomes concerned with saving its
offices, equipment, mailing lists, i.e. in preserving itself. Its
principle tasks become paying the office rent and phone
bills and getting people out of jail. And the more it is
attacked, the more it has only one issue to bring before
people-defend the organization. When an organization’s
overwhelming concern becomes its own preservation, it is
no longer waging a struggle. It has merely become an
employer with so many on the payroll and bills to be paid.

The organization begins to rule its members instead of the
members using the organization as a means to the end.
a means to the end.

(^)ne of the important tasks of the Seventies will be to
examine and evaluate organizations and if necessary, dis-
band many and create others. Our loyalties have to be to
the struggle, not to any particular organization. Too many
people have left an organization and thereby, left “the
movement,” thinking that an organization was synonymous
with “the movement.”

Intense involvement with organizational internal affairs
can blind us to what we are supposed to be about-the
creation of a society based upon values of humanity. Yet,
we cannot be the vehicle for the creation of this society
unless we ourselves are in the process of being trans-
formed. If we become narrow in outlook, if we refuse to
be open to criticism, to new concepts, we become the
fascists we say we are fighting. If we become so self-
righteous and self-important that we talk to no one and
listen to no one who does not agree with the way we view
the world, we are even less than those we are allegedly
fighting because we are supposed to know better. If we
continue to substitute the waving of the little red book for
thought, if we continue to substitute the screaming of
slogans for ideology, if we continue to divide and fight
among ourselves, then “the movement” of the Seventies
will be comprised of bitter, disillusioned idealists who lost
the dream.

We must not mistake an organization, a gun, or even an
ideology for the revolution. They are only means toward it.
Revolution is first and foremost a question of morality, a
question of values, a question of the inner life of people. If
we lose sight of this, we can create a society in which
everyone is well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, and find a
new generation of the young rising up and saying, “We
want the world and we want it NOW!”

We had the dream and we are losing it. If we can regain
the fervor and intensity of that dream in the next five
years, that will be more than enough. To create a society
in which each man has the opportunity to love himself and
thereby, the opportunity to love his fellows. That is the
dream. Before we can create the revolution which will
make real the dream, we must begin to create it among
ourselves. In the beginning it was easy to maintain the
dream. Now, because the problems facing us are more
complex than we ever imagined, maintaining the dream is
that much more difficult. Letting that dream suffuse our
every thought, word and deed is that much more difficult.
Yet, that is what we must do, no matter how difficult it
becomes. Without the dream, there is no revolution.

Julius Lester is a long-time activist and author of Look
Out Whitey, Black Power’s Gonna Get Your Mamma and
Revolutionary Notes.

30

August-September, 1969

in defense of
SDS

Mark Naison

jfjefore we try to project where the
left should be going, we got to
recognize that many brothers and sis-
ters involved in the most serious politi-
cal work no longer think in terms of
an all-inclusive movement. To the
regional organizers and national collec-
tive of SDS, the Progressive Labor
party and all who share its opposition
to black liberation struggles are traitors
and enemies. To the Black Panther
Party, Ron Karenga’s US organization
which murdered two Panther leaders in
Los Angeles is a stain which must be
purged from the black community at
all costs. Whether these factional wars
are a sign of the New Left’s maturity
or degeneration is open to debate. But
it is an undeniable fact that as the
American left has begun to emerge as a
serious revolutionary force, those
organizations in the forefront of the
struggle are beginning to draw sharp
ideological boundaries around their
political work.

The speed with which the atmos-
phere of the struggle has changed has
shocked many long time activists.
Highly respected movement intellec-

Courtesy of Associated American Artists

tuals such as Julius Lester, Staughton
Lynd, and Greg Calvert have publicly
bemoaned the movement’s new harsh-
ness in rhetoric and insularity in prac-
tice. To these writers, the ghost of
“Stalinism” with its purges, its
ponderous language, its racism posing
as anti-racism, its vanguard pretensions
and megalomaniac style— have come
back to haunt us. After all the careful
efforts made to establish the left on a
fraternal, democratic basis, the leading
radical organizations in the black and
white community seem hell-bent on
imitating the worst abuses of the old
left.

Those of us who are the “Stalinists”
in this situation therefore have a lot of
explaining to do to people on the
sidelines. Why are we kicking people
out of SDS, waving red books, carrying
(or talking about carrying) guns, and
reviving tired concepts like the “van-
guard” and the “revolutionary party.”

The explanation goes deeper than
4 4 paranoia,” “guilt,” or “youthful
adventurism.” Fundamental changes in
the movement’s political analysis
underlie these shifts in strategy and
style. Many of the New Left’s initial
assumptions have been exposed as illu-
sions during the crises of die past year.
Through study, through struggle,
through the force of repression, we’ve
learned some basic political lessons.

First. That there is no significant
possibility that American capitalism
will progressively reform itself into a
non-exploitative, socialist society. The
election returns, the continuation of
the war, the assasination of Kennedy
and King, the police riots in Chicago,
Berkeley and Madison, the brutal sup-
pression of the Panthers and black
student groups, and our growing
(cumulative) knowledge about the
meaning of imperialism have left us
with the feeling that there can be no

Liberation

31

such thing as a peaceful, democratic
transformation of American society.
Every gain for oppressed or exploited
people in the United States is paid for
by greater exploitation of people in
other segments of the American
Empire. The old conception of agita-
tors within the system is a bad dream.
There are no more Radicals, only
Revolutionaries.

Second. The idea that a new work-
ing class of technicians, professionals,
and intellectuals will play the leading
role in the transformation of advanced
industrial society has been exposed as
a myth. This was the year we saw New
York City teachers strike harder
against the black community than they
ever did against the city, college pro-
fessors denounce student radicals more
passionately than -they ever did the
warmakers, and clerks, technicians and
lower corporate personnel vote in
larger numbers for Wallace than any
social stratum except farmers. At the
same time, disconterjj< within the army,
the expansion of the movement in the
high schools and community colleges,
the growth of wildcat strikes, and the
unprecedented cooperation of students
and workers in the French general
strikes showed enormous untapped
potential for radicalism among less
privileged sectors of the working class,
particularly the young. We began to
see that much of the movements pro-
gram and style, including its lack of
discipline, its endless debates, its
abhorrence of violence, reflected the
class attitudes of students at the elite
universities, and had to be changed as
the movement spread to less privileged
sectors.

'Jhird. We began to understand the
pivotal role that national liberation
struggles by Third-World peoples and
black and brown minorities in America
would play in bringing down imperi-
alism. While Vietnam fought on, while
student strikes paralyzed Mexico and
A r g e n t i na, while gu erilla activity

increased in Guatemala and Venezuela,
the black struggle in America also
attained new heights of militancy and
political sophistication. The nationwide
growth of the Black Panther Party, the
emergence of revolutionary black cau-
cuses among auto and transit workers,

the initiation of armed struggle by
black college students at North Caro-
lina A&T and Cornell, the three-month
shutdowns of CCNY and San Francisco
Stat6 by “co-optable” black students,
and the thousands of local struggles
waged by black high school students
and working people showed all but the
racist and the blind where the major
internal challenge to American imperi-
alism was coming from. All of these
activities were inspired by a nationalist
impulse, but it was a nationalism that
was moving far beyond “Hate Whitey.”
Under the leadership of SNCC, the
Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement
and the Panthers, radical black spokes-
men were showing how black power
could be combined with a class analy-
sis, and alliances formed with politi-
cally conscious whites who respected
the black community’s right to self
determination.

r Jhese theoretical insights forced a
complete reevaluation of the left’s stra-
tegic thinking. For the first time in
recent American history, black and
white activists began to pay serious
attention to the problem of the trans-
fer of power, and have concluded that
it is unlikely that socialism will come
in America without destroying or
neutralizing the armed power of the
capitalist state. Given this conclusion it
is not at all surprising that the theo-
reticians we are turning to for guidance
are those who were engaged in the
practice of revolutionary struggle :
Lenin, Mao, Che, Lin Piao. Those who
complain about the irrelevance of these
thinkers to conditions in advanced
industrial society ignore the metho-
dological contributions they have made
in integrating theory, political analysis,
and military strategy into the Marxian
framework. We are aware of the limita-
tions of Leninism and Maoism as
humane philosophy, but they are the
only varieties of Marxism (there are at
least 57) which have succeeded in esta-
blishing socialism in an important poli-
tical area. For socialists who have lost
all hope in the revolutionary pos-
sibilities of the electoral process or the
“mass strike,” it is a perspective we are
forced to study seriously out of our
very responsibility to win the revolu-
tion

Our new theoretical stance has been
criticized so hysterically that it has
been hard to arrive at an objective
understanding of our mistakes in prac-
tice in the last year. Vilified as “Stalin-
ists,” “totalitarians,” and “suburban
putchists,” it has been tempting for us
to regard any criticism as a betrayal of
the struggle, or the product of a
starry-eyed humanism which expects
that a battle for socialism can be
waged without corrupting many of
those involved in it. But much of the
criticism has been worthy of our con-
cern. One point in particular is basic;
even if the shift in our political per-
spective is correct, it has occurred so
quickly that it has left our constituen-
cies far behind. The political perspec-
tive of this essay is shared by perhaps
5000 people (although pivotal ones)
around the country and their efforts at
implementation have, been clumsy at
best. Both the Panthers and the Revo-
lutionary Youth Movement Caucus in
SDS have acquired the habit of
attacking anyone who disagrees with
them as counterrevolutionary. Such
practices are particularly dangerous for
a revolutionary group. Even as we
become more disciplined, we must be
careful to leave open channels within
the movement where people can make
the transition from liberalism or
apathy to radicalism.

Any projection of where the revolu-
tionary left should be going in the
next ten years must come to terms
with this tension between openness and
internal discipline. If revolutionary
struggle is to succeed, there must be
cadre organization within factories, the
military, the police and pivotal schools,
communities and government bureau-
cracies. These collective have to be
capable of initiating action to shut
down the economy and the state appa-
ratus, and to defend that action mili-
tarily or neutalize the state’s military
response. But at the same time, these
collectives have to grow out of organi-
zation which brings revolutionary poli-
tics to the people, which makes the
transfer of power acceptable and
understandable, and provides for free
discussion of the movements ultimate
objectives. Considerable attention must
be given in the future to ways of

32

August-September, 1969

consolidating mass support without
sacrificing a revolutionary position.
Unless vanguard cadres are constantly
expanding the movement’s base, they
will wither into sour terrorist cells.

Despite its weakness, the American
left has certain natural advantages in
transcending this problem. Many of the
new Marxist^eninists in SDS and the
Panthers have come to politics
through involvement in “cultural rebel-
lions” and are sensitive to the sweeping
changes in the consciousness of black
and white youth that have occurred in
the past ten years. They should under-
stand the need to maintain the identifi-
cation of the revolutionary left with
the liberating cultural currents of the
time, even as the parasitic and elitist
aspect of the culture are criticized. We
must make a disciplined effort to avoid
a formulistic approach to culture and
consider people’s inner needs as seri-
ously as their material interests.

This places a great responsibility on
the radical media. No other activity
can play a greater role in counter-
acting elitist tendencies within the left
and we should look forward to its
dramatic expansion. The year 1979
should see nationwide revolutionary
newspapers such as the Guardian and
the Black Panther with circulations of
over a million, the emergence of mass
circulation left magazines, and the
commensurate growth of community
newspapers, film groups, street theatre,
rock and blues bands, and radio sta-
tions (licensed or underground) that
grow out of local organizing. But at
the same time, the revolutionary
artists, journalists, and scholars have to
take special effort to avoid the mental-
ity and practice of an intellectual

caste. This involves two responsibili-
ties: a) To do all their intellectual and
artistic work in autonomous radical
media (and contribute to their organi-
zational development) and b) To parti-
cipate in collectives and mass organiza-
tions in the local areas. Both of these
principles cut through the dangerous
division between critics and organizers
which plagues the left today (such as
the incredible hostility between aca-
demic “socialists” and movement acti-
vists.) They should organizationally
link art and theory to the construction
of new institutions. In the develop-
ment of radical media, the revolu-
tionary left should be working to
“create the new society within the
womb of the old.”

Local organizing should seek to fol-
low the same principles, but the task
(to put it mildly) will be more dif-
ficult. The primary responsibility of

Courtesy of Associated American Artists

white revolutionaries in the next ten
years is to spread the movement to the
white working class. This has to be
done in communities, in high schools
and colleges, in the army, and at the
point of production. Any movement
which cannot relate to the day-to-day
problems of struggling with scarcity,
and with the productive apparatus will
be incapable of developing a serious
understanding of the operations of the
American economy, and would make a
colossal mess if by accident it ever did
come to power. But at the same time,
we cannot just jump into organizing
with the idea of “learning from the
workers” or with the expectation that
once some mystical unit called the
“working class” is aroused, the socialist
revolution is a foregone conclusion.
The type of motion, the type of
actions we organize, even around very
immediate issues, have to be of a kind
that generate revolutionary conscious-
ness and an orientation toward power,
not just narrow class interest. In parti-
cular, white workers just like everyone
else we want in the movement have to
relate to the international character of
the American political economy and
the special oppression of black people
within America. Struggles have to be
sought, and education programs run
which challenge white nationalism,
which enable white workers, like the
rest of us, to see their interest linked
to a revolution which will use the
productive apparatus of America in the
interests of all working people who
have been oppressed by A merican
imperialism.

^/|/hat does this mean in practice?
First, that the primary focus be on

Liberation

33

organizing working class youth, parti-
cularly in areas where the black libera-
tion movement has begun to generate
tensions. Blue collar youth and young
workers don’t have as strong a commit-
ment to racism as their parents: they
don’t have a mortgage to protect, a
skill category to defend, or (on the
cultural side) a depression psychology
of militant anti-communism. They see
both a society collapsing around (and
on top of) them and the beginnings of
resistance. Our role will be to pull
them into that resistance through
actions which challenge the growing
militarization of the society and the
deterioration of working class
life. This means fights against curfews,
pigs in the schools, plant speedups,
sellout?* union bureaucracies, roundups
for the draft, repression in the army. It
means efforts to draw working class
kids into anti-war and anti-imperialist
struggles— street demonstrations, cam-
pus take-overs, defense actions against
groups hit by repression. And it means
extended efforts to ally working class
youth with black people already in
motion— the Panthers, black labor cau-
cuses, and black student groups-and
to explain how the black liberation
m o vement creates r evolu tionary pos-
sibilities for the entire working class.
Unlike traditional “community organi-
zers” we’ll be rapping about imperial-
ism and the need for revolution from
the beginning. We’ll be laying down a
strategy for a youth movement that
fights , and bringing kids in on their
perception of a totality of oppression.

^econdly, we should orient our
organizing toward the goal of citywide
and regional movements as quickly as
possible. For the next few years, much
of the revolutionary left’s organizing
will take place in neighborhoods.
Organizers will be moving into working
class areas and making their contacts,
doing educational work, and mobilizing
kids into militant action around local
and national issues. But as soon as
this organizing begins to take effect,
connections should be made between
various organizing projects, people
brought into each others struggles, and
efforts made to plan strategy on a
city-wide level. Once this point is

reached, the politics of the revolution
become clear in a way that can take us
beyond the stage of the youth move-
ment. As struggles against the pigs
and army are tied in with labor strikes
and protests against cutbacks in public
service (schools, hospitals, libraries,
welfare, public transportation) an
important political point emerges: that
the economic squeeze on the working
class and blacks is part of a general
crisis of imperialism, a crisis which
requires more and more pigs to keep
order. From there it’s a question of
power, ours or theirs. We begin to
work toward a point where every local
picket line, street demonstration, occu-
pation, or defense action, will be
joined by people from all over a region
and where every step taken to repress
us will be met by the involvement of
more and more people.

7^(1, we need to draw a network
of cadres and collectives from the
regional movements which begin to
map out revolutionary strategy to
define and develop the structure of the
new society. These groups will prob-
ably only have begun to develop on a
serious scale in the next ten years, and
there is great danger in their being
created prematurely out of frustration
with the speed of local organizing
work. But in a society with a repres-
sive apparatus as effective as this one,
and with such a complex social struc-
ture, it is in such collectives that the
basic framework of the revolutionary
movement must be hammered out.
Specifically, the military aspect of
revolutionary activity and the co-
ordination between white and black
movements will have to be planned at
this level. Neither of these pivotal and
delicate tasks can be approached in a
completely open fashion.

Still, these critical responsibilities
only underline the need to have collec-
tives grow out of practice and in a
climate of widespread support. The
principles of armed struggle and alli-
ance with the black liberation move-
ment have to be emphasized and prac-
ticed in all aspects of our organizing in
strikes, mass demonstrations, and local
liberation movements like the battle
for People’s Park. Only as large seg-
ments of the working population,

black and white, become accustomed
to the idea of struggling against the
armed power of the state will there be
any hope of a socialist revolution. Elit-
ism by cadres must be fought at every
point- without sacrificing the move-
ment’s politics. We must not allow the
revolution to be isolated from the mass
of the American people.

J\Jone of this is going to be easy. We }
have an awesome task: We must make
a revolution in the heartland of the I
most powerful empire that man has
ever created, with an international poli-
tical economy attuned to the tactics of
divide and conquer, a working class
divided by deep racial hate, and an
apparatus of repression that staggers
the imagination. In ten years, if we are
still alive, we will have just begun to
develop the mass support to be a seri-
ous revolutionary threat, and we will
be harassed and murdered and incar-
cerated in an effort to stop us. We
have only to look at the Panthers to
know that the Man doesn’t fuck
around. Twenty Panthers dead, hun-
dreds in jail on trumped-up charges,
virtually all their local offices shot up,
bombed and burned. We’ll get the
same and more when we begin to build
support among-the people. It makes a
lot of us hesitate, draw back from
politics. Is the revolution worth all this
bloodshed, all this risk? Is it worth the
faction fights, the sense of corruption
we feel as leaders or fighters, the ego
trips?

But then we begin to think. About a
South African native quarter. A Viet-
namese peasant scarred by napalm. A
Bolivian miner. A university plaza in
Mexico City filled with dead bodies. Sic
kids on a roof in Harlem shooting junk,
blood. An Arkansas prison farm. A toi-
let in a Mississippi gas station saying
“white only,” Gary Indiana, Cairo, Illi-
nois. Thirty-eight thousand dead boys.
One million dead people. American im- J
perialism. It’s a real thing. Not just 1
words, not just pictures on a television |
screen. Not just a bad dream, but blood
and suffering and exploitation.

When you face that fact, there ain’t
nothing to do but fight.

Power to the People.

Mark Naison is active in New York Re-
gional SDS.

34

August-September, 1969

ftVl GETT/N6 HI© CgpWiTH THAT'
WE 60TT/V Igg) _

IT'S^BJEP.

The Great Chicago Conspiracy

Trial Date: September 24

Mass Demonstration in Chicago: October 11

Liberation

Getting to Know America

Bob Cook

Bob Cook taught sociology at Yale
and is one of the founders of AIM in
New Haven.

£o be honest about the movement
and its future today is to be critical. I
consider the last ten years in America
to be the most exciting politically
since the days of Haywood and Debs.
The black movement, led by the older
civil rights groups and white students,
and the anti-war movement, led by
older peace groups and white students,
are legitimate bearers of that heroic
radical tradition which too few of us
know is part of our heritage. But these
movements had limited, while admir-
able, goals. Now their remnants are re-
grouping and purport to be revolu-
tionary; this is a broader, more serious
aim-as Carl Oglesby says. The differ-
ence between radicals and revolution-
aries is that the latter are dead ser-
ious— and for that reason the move-
ment deserves our most self-searching
analysis.

revolution, as I understand it, is a
mass of people participating in their
own liberation and the transformation
of their society, yet the basic criticism
of our movement today is that it is cut
off from the mass of Americans who
must make the American revolution.
This too, is part of our heritage, as a
result of the misdirection of the Amer-
ican left since the Russian Revolution.
Our task today is to locate the root
causes of our isolation and to eliminate
them. As I see it, the key problems
within the movement are:

1. The gap between rhetoric and re-
ality . To look at what we are saying ,
in comparison with what we are doing,
and even more important, with the
world around is, is to see a discrepancy
so great as to warrant calling us almost
insane, dwellers in a land of fantasy.
We hear calls for armed revolution
from students who have just been at-

tacking militarism and who never shot
a gun in their lives. We hear college
freshmen at elite universities, just out
of fancy high schools, talking about
what the workers are “really like.” We
see revolutionary posturing not much
different from the posturing of the
hippies, beats, or other bohemian ac-
tors. In effect, we have an intellectual-
ization of politics in which words take
on a reality of their own, the result
being endless debates over “positions”,
factionalism, and ultimately, isolation
of the movement which engages prin-
cipally in esoteric verbal “struggles”.

2. Lack of consciousness of rela-
tion to and respect for the culture of
most Americans. It all began inno-
cently enough with white students
going South, and coming back with the
stereotypes of the fat southern sheriff
and the beer-drinking redneck. (Re-
member all the folksongs, like “High
Sheriff of Hazard” or “Mississippi Find
Yourself Another Country to Belong
To”? Dylan alone saw through it, with
“Pawn in Their Game.”) But we have
come to the point where someone go-
ing to the SDS convention in Chicago
does not want to drive through small
American towns because they are full
of pigs! In a condescending manner
that has become, unfortuaunately,
typical; the movement champions na-
tionalism in others (Blacks, Viet-
namese), while denying it to ourselves.
We are internationalists, it is argued,
far above petty nationalism. Other re-
volutionaries know better. In a brilliant
series of lectures, the artist David
Siqueiros spoke of the way the Mexi-
can muralists’ work had developed as a
result of their growing awareness of
the struggle of the people. While rejec-
ting false nationalism, they found
“that by learning to know well our

man, the man of our land, we were
going to gain a greater knowledge of
the universal man. All the great master-
pieces of the past had been done in
that way; beginning by knowing the
national man.” Closing with advice to
other artists, he says that “you your-
selves must bring forth your art from
your own land and your own people;
you must extract it from your national
history. You must create monuments.
But create monuments that are under-
standable to your people, even though
this be only by means of emotion.”

]n Vietnamese Studies No. 15, there
is an account of underground revolu-
tionary work by Le Quang Ba, who
later led the 316th Division of the
DRV army at Dien Bien Phu. He tells
of this work among the peasants in the
mountain regions, and how early the
organizers made the mistake of attack-
ing people’s superstitutions by throw-
ing incense burners into the river,
which led only to big ceremonies to
beg the gods for pardon. Later, they
were taught by Ho to respect local
customs; for example, not to cook
beef with families that avoided it; to
spend the night in the fields guarding
the crops on Tet, when local families
did not want strangers in their houses.

And Julius Lester has pointed out
how ridiculous it would have been for
SNCC organizers in the South to ig-
nore the local black churches, or,
worse, to attack religion as the opiate
of the masses.

Yet our movement goes on ignoring
the history, customs, traditions, and
real strengths of our people.

3. The social composition of the
movement. Underlying the above
faults, and the probable cause for
them, is the fact that the movement

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36

August-Sept ember, 1969

Lib

Provincetown

I

draws its recruits overwhelmingly from
students and university people and
among these from two special types:
the sons and daughters of profes-
sionals, and upwardly mobile persons
from the working class. Knowing, as
we do, that social existence determines
consciousness, it should be clear that
the main perversions of the movement
today are a direct result of its social
character. University students have
lived their lives in a sheltered academic
atmosphere. The main reality for them
has been the classroom, and they have
been trained to perform well in that
environment. Words for them are tools,
and their skill with words determines
their position within the academic
world. The dominant quality of their
experience is its very narrowness.

Add to that their social back-
grounds: the families of professionals
lead special and privileged lives, and
are taught to view ordinary people
with contempt. Upwardly mobile per-
sons, moreover, are just those who
have been most adept at shedding the
trappings of their class, at leaving be-
hind their families, old friends, accent
and dress.

The result is an intellectualized poli-
tics of guilt on the one hand and con-
descension on the other.

We know that men can determine
their own history within the limits set
by social conditions. The future of the
movement for the next five to ten
years will be determined to a large
extent by the actions of the ruling
class in America and by revolutionaries
outside of America. But within those
limits, the future of the movement will
be shaped by the decisions of its parti-
cipants. Unless some of us take radical
steps to deal with the problems out-
lined here, the most likely scenario for

the future is a repeat of the fifties —
maybe with more violent repression.
The alternative will require the courage
to flaunt established movement dogma
and to face the fact that the American
people are today a long ways from
revolutionary consciousness.

In effect, it will be necessary for
some elements of the movement to cut
themselves off from the organized left
and the student culture. They will have
to live, work, and struggle with the
mass of Americans, at first to learn,
only later to teach. They will have to
organize around what the people per-
ceive to be their problems— probably
not war and racism. Only by living
with and learning from the people will
revolutionaries be able to speak to
them in a language that is under-
standable.

The organizational form of the
American Revolutionary Movement
cannot be predicted, because it will
have to grow from the activity of the
people as revolutionary culture again
merges with American culture. As new
leadership develops among the people,
new organizational forms will be
created (this has already happened in
the black movement, first in SNCC,
then in the Panthers).

It does seem unlikely to me that
the new movement will be centralized,
bureaucratic, or Leninist in form, part-
ly because of the great diversity in
America, partly because the American
revolutionary tradition is primarily an-
archist. In any event, for the next five
to ten years, the movement will, I be-
lieve, be decentralist. The most viable
organizational form for that period will
likely be thousands of rather small col-
lectives, or affinity-groups, carrying out
individual projects. Some may work

around m ovement institutions like
schools or presses; others may be or-
ganizing committees in shops, neigh-
borhoods, or vocations.

One advantage of such groups is that
they minimize the amount of time
spent on internal organizational prob-
lems' since they are small and most
coordination takes place jn a natural,
almost instinctive fashion. A second
advantage is security, both from exter-
nal agents and provocateurs, and from
left disruptors. Finally, they provide an
atmosphere of mutual support and
trust which is essential to the psycho-
logical well being of individual organiz-
ers. There should, and will be some
national coordinating agency for these
groups. I doubt that it will take the
form of a party. It may be the resur-
gent IWW, which has the advantage of
having been the greatest revolutionary
organization in our history. Or it may
be an entirely new federation.

The regular left will not, and should
not, d isappear . Student organizing,
anti-war activity, non-violent confron-
tations, and so one will all continue to
play an important role in shaking the
c o nscience of America. But unless
some of us are out there talking and
working with the people while they’re
being shaken, they will never under-
stand.

The new movement must, as Walt
Whitman said of the new poetry,
“bend its vision toward the future,
more than the past. Like America, it
must extricate itself from even the
greatest models of the past, and, while
courteous to them, must have entire
faith in itself, and the products of
its own democratic spirit
only. . . . Erect, inflated, and fully self
esteeming be the chant; and then
America will listen with pleased ears.”

Liberation

37

Somelasks for the Left

Noam Chomsky

J ^) ire warnings with regard to the state of American
society axe hardly confined to the left these days. Senator
Fulbright has recently warned that the United States is
“already a long way toward becoming an elective dictator-
ship.” If we continue on our present course, “the future
can hold nothing for us except endless foreign exertions,
chronic warfare, burgeoning expense and the proliferation
of an already formidable military-industrial-labor-academic
complex-in short, the militarization of American
life. ... If, in short, America is to become an empire, there
is very little chance that it can avoid becoming a virtual
dictatorship as well.” 1

Senator Fulbright was commenting on an attempt to
combat the erosion of the constitutional system, typical of
all Western parliamentary democracies as centralization of
power in the executive continually increases. The attempt
is embodied in a “sense of the Senate” resolution that was
proposed by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Its report (April 16, 1969) notes that the chief executive
“now exercises something approaching absolute power over
the life or death of every living American-to say nothing
of millions of other people all over the world.” It warns
that in consequence the American people are threatened
“with tyranny or disaster.”

The Committee’s report recalls the fears expressed by
Abraham Lincoln when President Polk “precipitated the
clash which began the Mexican War”: “Kings had always
been involving and impoverishing their people in wars,
pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the
people was the object. This our Convention undertook to
be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions; and they
resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man
should hold the power of bringing oppression upon us.”
The report notes further that there are 50,000 American
troops in Thailand, many “engaged in military support
operations against insurgency.” It cites a classified memo-
randum asserting “that the presence of American Armed
Forces in Spain constitutes a more significant security guar-
antee to Spain than would a written agreement.” Since the
only attack that threatens Spain is what is nowadays called
“internal aggression,” it is clear what form of “security” is
guaranteed by these secret agreements.

^he Senate Committee is surely accurate in remarking
that domestic tyranny is a likely concomitant to the
effort by the “Kingly oppressor” to protect such delightful
regimes as those of Spain and Thailand (and Saigon, and
Greece, and Brazil . . .) from “internal aggression.” We can
expect, with fair confidence, that any serious domestic
challenge to American global management or its ideological
underpinnings will call forth the repressive force and ulti-
mately the violence of the state. What we may expect,
then, is voluntary submission to the coercive ideology of
Pax Americana and its repressive practices, or the overt use
of force to compel obedience; in either case, a form of
domestic tyranny.

The attempt to construct an integrated global economy
dominated by American capital is one major theme of
post-war history. Though there have been setbacks, the
project proceeds apace along many paths, and no one can
predict the degree to which it will succeed. Evidently, only
certain forms of national development are compatible with
this aim, and American foreign policy has endeavored to
block all others. In practice this has often meant, in Joan
Robinson’s words, that “the United States crusade against
Communism is a campaign against development. By means
of it the American people have been led to acquiesce in the
maintencance of a huge war machine and its use by threat
or actual force to try to suppress every popular movement
that aims to overthrow ancient or modern tyranny and
begin to find a way to overcome poverty and establish
national self-respect.” 2

The maintenance of the huge war machine has deeper
social roots than the need to protect the regimes of Greece,
Spain, and Brazil from internal aggression. Even if Ameri-
can military support were not needed to preserve these
bastions of freedom, the militarization of American society
would be unlikely to abate. The particular form of state-
subsidized capitalism evolving in the United States demands
substantial government support for technologically ad-
vanced segments of American industry. Under existing so-
cial conditions, with public policy largely determined by
private empires, it is naturally preparation for war to which
the public subsidy is diverted. With the best of will, it is

38

August-September, 1969

not easy to devise alternative forms of government inter-
vention in the economy that will not conflict with the
interests of these private empires, but will rather en-
hance them. Furthermore, a public subsidy must be toler-
able to the population at large. Even a totalitarian state
must win some measure of popular support for its policies
and expenditures, and “defense of the home” is invariably
the last resort. A challenge to the system of preparation for
war is not likely to be tolerated.

Such a challenge has arisen in the United States in the
last few years, largely from the student movement and the
black liberation movements. The rising wave of repression
should therefore come as no surprise. The editors of
Monthly Review have quite correctly noted the analogy to
the post-war repression that helped to impose the narrow
conservatism that has dominated American life for the past
two decades. It is typical of repressive regimes, throughout
the world, that they place their harshest and most reac-
tionary figures in control of the Ministries of War and
Interior. The Nixon administration has adopted this famil-
iar practice (Laird and Mitchell). A bill now before Con-
gress proposes the establishment of a crime of peacetime
treason, with severe punishments for those who give “aid
and comfort” to “any foreign nation or armed group which
is engaged in open hostilities” with American armed forces.
The implications are clear. But even without such “legal”
authorization, there are many early signs of what might
ultimately become a police state, perhaps, with extensive

popular support: coordinated counter-insurgency opera-
tions, as in Berkeley; criminal police violence against Black
Panthers; harassment by quasi-judicial means; punitive sen-
tencing for minor violations; Congressional investigation of
universities, and so on.

Twenty years ago, the contribution of American liberal-
ism to the repression was not small. One of the first acts of
the Americans for Democratic Action was “to use guilt-by-
association tactics by printing in major urban newspapers
the names of the Progressive Party’s principal contributors
and then listing the organizations on the Attorney-General’s
list of subversive groups to which these contributors be-
longed— or had belonged,” 3 this well before McCarthy got
into the act. The hysterical reaction, in some quarters, to
the revival of politics in the Sixties suggests that history
may repeat. In these circumstances, even the defense of
civil liberties has a radical content.

The best way to defend civil liberties is to build a
movement for social change with a positive program that
has a broad-based appeal, that encourages free and open
discussion and offers a wide range of possibilities for work
and action. The potential for such a movement surely
exists. Whether it will be realized remains an open ques-
tion. External repression is one serious threat. Factional
bickering, dogmatism, fantasies and manipulative tactics are
probably a considerably greater danger.

A movement of the left should distinguish with clarity
between its long-range revolutionary aims, and certain more
immediate effects it can hope to achieve. Specifically, for
us today there is no priority higher than bringing the
Vietnam war to a quick end with the withdrawal of all
American military force. This may be a feasible goal. It
would entail the abandonment of a policy that has been
pursued for 20 years as part of a more general strategy for
constructing an integrated world empire compatible with
the perceived needs of American capital and organized in
accordance with the dominant principles of American ideo-
logy. Nevertheless this particular venture could no doubt be
“liquidated” without too severe a blow to the system-
fortunately for the people of Vietnam and Laos, for if this
were not true, there future would be dim indeed. I con-
tinue to believe that nonviolent resistance provides the best
means. for achieving this goal.

ut in the long run, a movement of the left hrs no
chance of success, and deserves none, unless it develops an
understanding of contemporary society and a vision of a
future social order that is persuasive to a large majority of
the population. Its goals and organizational forms must
take shape through their active participation in political
struggle and social reconstruction. A genuine radical culture
can be created only through the spiritual transformation of
great masses of people, the essential feature of any social
revolution that is to extend the possibilities for human
creativity and freedom. There is no doubt that we can
learn from the achievements and the failures of revolu-
tionary struggles in the less-developed countries, and it
would be as foolish to fail to do so as it would be criminal

Liberation

39

not to help where we can. It is evident, however, that their
experiences cannot be mechanically transferred to a society
such as ours. In an advanced industrial society it is, ob-
viously, far from true that the mass of the population have
nothing to los? but their chains, and there is no point in
pretending otherwise. On the contrary, they have a con-
siderable stake in preserving the existing social order. Cor-
respondingly, the cultural and intellectual level of any ser-
ious radical movement will have to be far higher than in
the past, as Andre Gorz, for one, has correctly emphasized.
It will not be able to satisfy itself with a litany of forms of
oppression and injustice. It will have to provide compelling
answers to the question of how these evils can be overcome
by revolution or large-scale reform. To accomplish this aim,
the left will have to achieve and maintain a position of
honesty and commitment to libertarian values. It must not
succumb to the illusion that a ‘Vanguard party,” self-
designated as the repository of all truth and virtue, can
take state power and miraculously bring about a revolution
that will establish decent values and truly democratic struc-
tures as the framework for social life. If its only clearly
expressed goals are to smash and destroy, it will succeed
only in smashing and destroying itself. Furthermore, if a
radical movement hopes to be able to combat imperialism,
or the kinds of repression, social management and coercion
that will be developed by the evolving international econ-
omic institutions, it too will have to be international in its
organizational forms as well as in the cultural level it seeks
to attain. To construct a movement of this sort will be no
mean feat. It may well be true, however, that success in
this endeavor is the only alternative to tyranny and disas-
ter.

T* threat of tyranny and disaster, or even their early
manifestations, do not themselves provide a sufficient basis
for the creation of a significant radical mass movement. In
fact, this threat may induce a conservative defensive reac-
tion. For a person to commit himself to a movement for
radical social change, with all of the uncertainty and hazard
that this entails, he must have a strong reason to believe
that there is some likelihood of success in bringing about a
new social order. This is not merely a matter of satisfaction
of personal, material needs, of narrow self-interest in the
sense cultivated by capitalist ideology. There is, to be sure,
a justification for radical politics even in terms of self-
interest in this narrow sense. The enormous waste of re-
sources that are far from boundless and the race towards
mutual annihilation on the part of the great powers provide
a sufficient reason for a rational man to seek actively for
some far-reaching alternative. Beyond this, it is by now
widely realized that the economist’s “externalities” can no
longer be consigned to footnotes. No one who gives a
moment’s thought to the problems of contemporary so-
ciety can fail to be aware of the social costs of consump-
tion and production, the progressive destruction of the
environment, the utter irrationality of the utilization of
contemporary technology, the inability of a system based
on profit- or growth-maximization to deal with needs that
can only be expressed collectively, and the enormous bias

this system imposes towards maximization of commodities
for personal use in place of the general improvement of the
quality of life. All of these are factors in modem life that
should lead to the growth of a vigorous left that seeks to
replace contemporary barbarism by some form of libertar-
ian socialism. But there is something insufferably arrogant
about the belief that “we” are radical because we are
humane, and that “they” will join us when they see that it
is in their self-interest to do so. Compassion, solidarity,
friendship are also human needs. They are driving needs, no
less than the desire to increase one’s share of commodities
or to improve working conditions. Beyond this, I do not
doubt that it is a fundamental human need to take an
active part in the democratic control of social institutions.
If this is so, then the demand for industrial democracy
should become a central goal of any revitalized left with a
working-class base.

In fact, in France and England there has been a renewed
interest in industrial democracy and workers’ control after
a lapse of quite a few years. 4 This is a most welcome
development. It is often argued that the formation of
enormous planning units— the centralized state bureaucracy,
immense corporations, or both acting in concert— is a tech-
nological imperative, a requirement for economic health
and proper utilization of resources in a complex advanced
industrial society. I have yet to see an argument that
advanced technology requires centralized autocratic man-
agement. The same technology that can strengthen the
authority of a narrow elite of owners, managers, or tech-
nocrats, might also be used to extend industrial democracy.
In its early stages, the industrial system required the kind
of specialized labor which, as Adam Smith pointed out,
turned men into imbeciles, mere tools of production. Now
this is no longer true. With modern technology, tools can
be tools and men can be men. The need for managers is a
corollary to the specialization of the labor force. It dimin-
ishes as the opportunities increase for each participant in
the work-force to obtain relevant information when it is
needed for decision-making and to achieve the cultural level
that enables him to take part in global decisions. Simula-
tion makes it possible to carry out certain experiments
without suffering the cost of failure. Automation may
provide the possibility to eliminate mind-destroying drud-
gery. To develop these possibilities in a concrete and de-
tailed form is the proper task for the left. It is a task that
can be carried out only by direct participation of manual
and intellectual workers; it should lead to blurring, perhaps
to the disappearance, of the distinction between these so-
cial categories.

can be plausibly argued is that planning is a
necessity in an advanced industrial society. One must, how-
ever, bear in mind an observation that is put very well by
Ken Coates, in introducing a recent symposium on workers’
control: “If planning has become a crucial need, then it has
also become transparently clear that none of the most basic
and elementary liberal values can survive such planning
upon such a scale, unless it is arranged along lines which
are inherently and profoundly democratic,” 5 The problem

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August-September, 1969

40

of how to combine planning with democracy, and so to
preserve and significantly extend and enrich liberal values,
will not be solved on paper, but only through a combina-
tion of practical experience and intellectual analysis. Al-
most by definition, this is a task for a revitalized move-
ment of the left, a movement that will combine the highest
level of science and technology with serious inquiry into
the sources and social conditions for creativity and free-
dom.

Questions of this sort barely exist in the academic social
sciences. For example, the leading textbook on modern
economics describes tin range of possible economic systems
as falling on a spectrum with complete laissez faire and
“totalitarian dictatorship of production” as the polar cases:
“the relevant choice for policy today is not a decision
between these extremes, but rather the degree to which
public policy should do less or more in modifying the
operation of particular private economic activities.” 6 Evi-
dently, basic questions are begged by describing the spec-
trum of possible systems in these terms. There is quite
another spectrum that can be imagined, with democratic
and autocratic control of the system of production as the
polar cases. Along this dimension, both of Samuelson’s
polar opposites fall at the same extreme point; both “ideal”
private capitalism and “totalitarian dictatorship of produc-
tion” are forms of autocratic control, to be contrasted with
popular democratic control of the economy through work-
ers* councils, commune assemblies, and other forms of
popular organization that can be imagined. Similarly, in a
recent symposium of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences devoted to “Perspectives on Business,” 7 there is
much discussion of the matter of management-vs.-owner-
ship control (and the effect of technology on this distribu-
tion of power), but no mention of the possibility that the
economic system might be brought under popular demo-
cratic control.

Jhe assumptions that guide the mass of scholarship
hardly differ from those expressed in manifestoes of the
American ruling elite, for example, the report of the study
group on Political Economy of American Foreign Policy ,
which identifies Western civilization with capitalist forms
(as contrasted to the collectivist denial of freedom, initia-
tive, and progress) and defines “the aim of economic acti-
vity in the West [as] the maximization of money income-
in one or another of its forms-by individuals through the
investment of capital or of labor on one’s own account or
for, and under the direction of, others.” 8 The document
goes on, characteristically, to describe this particular perver-
sion in terms of universal ideals. We cannot be merely an
“impartial arbiter . . . maintaining world order,” but must
be an active leader in the struggle to save Western civiliza-
tion and the “universal ideals of human freedom, individual
growth, and economic justice” which are expressed (“how-
ever imperfectly”) in the capitalist institutions of the
West.

Surely this concept of economic man is a psychological
absurdity which leads to untold suffering for those who try
to mold themselves to this pattern, as well as for their

victims. “Look out for number one” is a prescription for
demoralization, corruption, and ultimately general catas-
trophe, whatever value it may have had in the early stages
of industrialization. Cooperation for the common good and
concern for the rights and needs of others must replace the
dismal search for maximization of personal power and
consumption if the barbarism of capitalist society is to be
overcome.

r Jhe left has the inestimable advantage that it can hope
to speak for humane values in opposition to the barbarous
irrationality of a competitive society and to the autocratic
rule of private economic empires, state bureaucracies, van-
guard parties, technocratic-meritocratic elites, or whatever
other monstrosities the future may hold. It will have to
exploit this advantage if there is to be any hope for a
serious, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist movement with a
broad base in the advanced societies. Consider again the
manifesto cited above. It defines the primary threat of
Communism, perceptively, in the following terms: “It has
meant: (1) A serious reduction of the potential resource
base and market opportunities of the West owing to the
subtraction of the communist areas from the international
economy and their economic transformation in ways which
reduce their willingness and ability to complement the
industrial economies of the West.” 9 Evidently, this interp-
retation of the communist threat (which goes a long way
towards explaining Joan Robinson’s judgment, quoted above,
that the American crusade against Communism is a
campaign against development) will be quite compelling to
the rich, who will easily understand why our goal must be
to assist “the millhands of Calcutta, the peasants of Egypt
and the Indians of Guatemala [to] become politically more
reliable and economically more cooperative members of the
free world community”, able to exercise “the capacity for
self-control, for rational and morally valid choices and for
responsible actions.” American dominance of the world
requires such political reliability, cooperativeness, and
moral responsibility. For the wealthy and privileged, it is
easy to identify American dominance of the world’s re-
sources with “the continued existence of human freedom
and humane society everywhere.” This dominance is threat-
ened by forms of national independence or international
cooperation that appropriate resources for the benefit of
those who now “complement the industrial economies of the
West.” This kind of “threat” should be welcomed and
encouraged by the left, as should its domestic analogue. An
international movement of the left should aim, of course, to
reduce inequity. But this is to say that participants in such a
movement, in the advanced countries, must be motivated by
compassion and brotherhood rather than mere personal
greed. In the long run, there is no reason why an equitable
distribution of the earth’s resources should lead to a decline
of standard of living in the advanced countries, if it is
combined with an end to the irrational waste and destruction
of resources characteristic of the advanced industrial
societies. Once again, however, it is clear that a large-scale
“cultural revolution” is a prerequisite-or better, a necessary
concomitant-for a movement of the left with solid roots in

Liberation

41

te£hh6logicdUy advanced societies,
i The same cririsiderations hold when we consider the
matter of bringing the arms race to an end. In the
near future it will no doubt be exceedingly difficult to
6rgan.ize a campaign against militarism with support among
Workers, technicians, engineers and scientists, who are heav-
ily dependent on the military budget for their employment.

• When radical students at MIT succeeded in raising a serious
j challenge mihtary research, the first reaction of the
labor tinted in, the university laboratories was to enter a
suit in the federal courts to prevent MIT from dropping
tvotk. The response was not irrational; the New
l fefcgknd economy provides no alternative sources of em-
pfoyrhettf. Similar factors will make it quite difficult for
^ttginifers,, and many scientists, to dissociate themselves
from fife commitment to war and waste. If a radical move-
ment hopes to make any progress among skilled workers,
engineer* and scientists, it will have to persuade them that
their shorWun interest is outweighed by other factors,
among them, the personal interest of every rational man in
the edrtveftiprt of intellectual and material resources to
tetsonable $rids, more specifically, in halting the prepara-
tion foi war that may well lead to a final catastrophe. The
task for iadk&ls, in this case, is to develop concrete alter-
native^ and;. to show how they could be realized under
dtfferj ijftt conditions of social organization. Furthermore,

■ they t combat the psychotic world-view that has been
Constlftfet^d to rationalize the race to destruction. They
must try, tp bring about a fundamental change of values, a
eomi^tineht to general goals that will, once achieved, spell
art end tO; imperial domination, militarism, and oppression.

d«c^ ago, only a visionary would have been able
eton to ptetemplate these questions. Now they are lively
artd; exciting ones. The revisionist historians have succeeded
iri shattte^B the illusions that dominated post-war scholar-
s'. such as the North American Conference on

l4tih the Committee of Concerned Asian Schol-

ars, twftmion for Radical Political Economics, and many
others, ktwe the potential to revitalize the professions and
to pitta t& a radical intellectual culture with a broad base in
the uftlvdrsities and colleges, with effects that will extend
through, the media— perhaps newly created for this purpose
^tfee ititools, communities and activist organizations of
ftfeny iarts. Of course these professional groups have been
tiding tie prest of a wave of political activism. Inquiry that
li fret (from the narrow ideological constraints imposed by
doming social institutions will be severely inhibited, and
easy ft) disregard, unless the general political climate is
eohdhCiyfc to challenge and innovation. In the absence of a
live aid healthy radical political movement, the “softer”
dittqabtes will easily be subverted by social pressures, as
hi* s# often been the case. At the same time, a movement
of thfe left condemns itself to failure and irrelevance if it
does riot create an intellectual culture that becomes domi-
nant by virtue of its excellence and that is meaningful to
the masses of people who, in an advanced industrial so-
ciety, can participate in creating and deepening it.

The prospects seem to me good that the small groups
that now exist can grow and interact with one another and
with a political movement of the left that is rooted in
many strata of American society. I think that for the
present, the universities are a natural, and relatively favor-
able place for such growth and interaction. There is sure to
be opposition to the development of scholarship and teach-
ing that is not constrained by the dominant conservative
ideology. There will undoubtedly be an effort to repress
the activism that is a natural outgrowth of serious inquiry.
The universities have been highly politicized by the in-
fluence of the dominant social institutions, the national
state and the great corporations to which it is closely
linked. The natural conservatism of the faculty will com-
bine with the political conservatism imposed by external
pressures to set up barriers to free inquiry. Examples of
repression can easily be cited. Nevertheless, they should not
be exaggerated. It should be recognized that in any field,
there is resistance to innovation on the part of those who
have achieved a certain staus and prestige. This natural
resistance, easy to document, provides a kind of base line
in terms of which one must assess the actual political
repression that exists in the universities. My personal feel-
ing is that by this measure, which is the correct one,
repression on political grounds is not extensive, at the
moment. It may grow, but that is not to say that it will
necessarily succeed. For the present, there is no strong
reason for pessimism, in this regard.

(^)f particular significance, I think, are certain efforts
undertaken in the past year among scientists and engineers.
For example, at MIT a handful of graduate students
succeeded, within a few months, in organizing a one-day
research strike that spread to some 50 colleges, and that led
to the formation of active and continuing organizations of
students and faculty. This initiative grew out of a sanctuary
for an AWOL soldier, Mike O’Conner, which was held at MIT
last fall and dramatically changed the political climate on the
the political climate on the campus.

In some ways, the creation of a radical movement of
scientists and engineers is analogous to the organization of
GI resistance. American imperial dominance is based as
much on technique as on mass military force. As Franz
Schuimann has rightly pointed out, “it is not likely that,
barring a major emergency, the United States could again
foot a massive army,” and “aside from a few puppet states
such as South Korea, no country has been willing to
provide the U.S. militarists with the manpower necessary to
fight ‘limited wars’ distant from America’s shores. . . . Thus
[the U.S.] must depend on technology to fight its
wars.” 10 Furthermore, scientists and engineers are well
aware of the corruption of intelligence imposed by a sys-
tem so irrational that the majority of engineers are forced
to accept employment with NASA, the AEC (in essence, a
weapons producing agency), and the Defense Department.
There is, therefore, symbolic significance in the fact that a
successful movement of scientists and engineers has devel-
oped, in part, from an expression of solidarity with a GI
resister. By means of such organization of scientists and

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engineers, the system of subsidy to technologically ad-
vanced segments of industry and achievement of global
dominance through a subverted technology can be threat-
ened at its most vulnerable point, its personnel. Scientists
and engineers can make the same key contribution to a
radical culture— ultimately, a successful movement for sig-
nificant social change— that they now make to militarism
and repression.

As already noted, it is inconceivable that the left can
achieve real success in an advanced industrial society unless
it develops the intellectual resources to provide plausible,
concrete solutions to the problems of our society. Those
who believe that these problems can be met only when
social institutions are reconstructed along democratic lines
have the task of showing that this is so. Potential solutions
to these problems are of limited interest when they merely
appear in technical monographs (though even this would be
a far from negligible accomplishment). They must become
engrained in the consciousness of those who will implement
them and live under the conditions that they bring into
existence. There are many kinds of interaction among
scientists, engineers, technicians and skilled workers, the
blue collar work force, professionals and other white collar
workers, writers and artists, among all of those who must
contribute to a vital movement of the left. Some of these
connections I have already mentioned; specifically the ap-
plication of modern technology to creating the conditions
for industrial democracy and the rational and humane use
of resources is one major task that lies on the immediate
horizon. A serious mass movement of the left should in-
volve all of these segments of American society. Its politics
and understanding must grow out of their combined efforts

to build a new world.

L

FOOTNOTES

1 Boston Globe , June 20, 1969.

2 “Contrasts in economic development: China and India”,
in Neal Houghton, ed., Struggle Against History, New
York, 1968.

3 Walter Lafeber, America , Russia and the Cold War, p.
73. See Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American
Left , for a perceptive discussion of the “cultural cold war”
of the 1950’s,

4 See, for example, the new French journal Autogestion
and the publications of the Institute for Workers’ Control,
91 Goldsmith St., Nottingham, England.

5 Can the Workers Run Industry , Ken Coates, ed., Sphere
Books and the Institute for Workers’ Control, 1968.

ist and socialist governments. The capitalist elite . might
agree with Stalin that egalitarianism is “a reactipnaijy petty-
bourgeois absurdity worthy of some sect of ascetics” (17th
Party Congress). The document goes on .to. insajt, that wi
must preserve the right to intervene in support of “older f
ruling groups” who see “that their future independence lies !
in alliance with the West,” unless the responsible middle/
class elements have achieved dominance. We must continue'
to ensure that Western Europe and Japan refrain frorr*
“neutralism and pacifism”— in the case of Japan, by makiftf
“possible greater Japanese participation in the development
of Southern Asia” -a non-negligible factor in the Vietnam
war, incidentally, We must combat irrational communist
inspired land redistribution, as in Guatemala where (as hi
Iran) “nationalistic totalitarian or crypto-communist re-
gimes have nearly succeeded in consolidating their rule”
(the reference is to Arbenz and Mossadegh). And so on. .

6 Paul Samuelson, Economics , sixth edition, 1964.

7 Daedalus, Winter, 1969.

8 Woodrow Wilson Foundation and National Planning
Association, Holt, 1955. Our humane values are illustrated
further, in this important document, in many ways. Thus
“constructive wage and social welfare policies are obviously
needed”-why?: “to mitigate industrial unrest.” At the
same time it is necessary to combat the excessive egalitar-
ianism and social welfare legislation undertaken under left-

9 There are three other aspects to this threat: “A planned
disruption of the free world economies”; the higher growth
rate of Soviet heavy industry (N.B., the date is 1955); “the
fact that Soviet communism threatens not merely tlie poli-
tical and economic institutions of the West but the con-
tinued existence of human freedom and humane society
everywhere.”

10 “The Nixon administration and the Vietnam ^ar,”
paper submitted to the Stockholm Conference on Vieftiam,
May, 1969.

43

Liberation

A Program for Fbst-Campus Radicals

Staughton Lynd

February, on the anniversary
of the first sit-in, the movement will
be ten years old. One way to give
some shape in our imaginations to the
decade of the 1970s is to try to assess
the work of the decade almost over.
What were the strengths and weak-
nesses of the political work of the
American New Left in the 1960s?

The most common criticism of the
movement is that it has had no theory.
Liberals and radicals join in making
this criticism. Liberals speak of the
movement’s mindless activism, its nihil-
ism, its alleged propensity to the sub-
stitution of tactics for strategy. Many
persons within the movement itself
now echo this criticism, except that
they use words like opportunism, eco-
nomism, revisionism, reformism.

My own criticism (and self-criticism)
is almost precisely the reverse. I think
our greatest weakness has been that we
failed to become more than a move-
ment of students, allied professionals,
and blacks; and that this limitation has
expressed itself in the fact that we
have been more interested in ideas
than in power. The drift from organi-
zing to rhetoric during the past year
accentuated a tendency which had
existed from the beginning.

Our triumph in the 1960s was that
we radicalized the consciousness of
hundreds of thousands of Americans,
mostly young and almost all on cam-
pus. Our failure was that we could not
offer continuing organizations and pro-
grams by means of which ordinary
people could win concrete victories
which changed their daily lives. The
only political program of this sort the
New Left has ever had was SNCC’s
program of voter-registration in
1961-1964. The consciousness which
we radicalized has had, politically, no-
where to go.

Illustrative of this one-sidedness in
the movement’s work is the concept of
“corporate liberalism.” Corporate
liberalism was not a system of power.
It was and is a system of ideas with
which hypocritical liberals clothe the
realities of power. The typical new
recruit to the movement in the 1960s
found it necessary to begin by unmask-
ing those politically closest to him: his
liberal parents, and the liberal Demo-

cratic politicians in power in Washing-
ton. In a curious way, therefore, our
“line” resembled that of the German^
Communist Party before Hitler’s acces-
sion to power, in that we, too, concen-
trated our political fire on liberals
rather than reactionaries (we heckled
Humphrey and left Nixon alone). The
phony ideas of liberal intellectuals,
rather than the real power of corporate
America, was our main target.

The white movement’s most deter-
mined attempt to organize off-campus
was ERAP (itself stimulated by SNCC’s
voter registration program). As Richie
Rothstein has pointed out, the dozen
or so ERAP projects won very few
victories. They tended to excuse their
defeats with the argument that at Ipast
people’s ideas had been radicalized.
There was a constant tendency for
ERAP organizers to pull back from the
teaching-through-action of the organi-
zer to the explicit instruction of the
school, the study circle, the collective.
(Surely this is one of the reasons the
work of the ERAP organizers produced
such meager results.)

Consistent with my argument, too,
is the fact that when movement people
leave the campus they tend to become
workers with ideas: they start news-
papers, make films, open guerrilla thea-
ters. The movement is like an early
model of James Watt’s steam engine. It
produces a tremendous head of steam
on campus, but as the piston moves
through the chamber— in this case, as
the tens of thousands of radicalized
students move off the campus— the
steam escapes, the energy is dispersed.
Surely this is in part the result of the
fact that there is hardly a single off-
campus movement organization, involv-
ing adults as well as single young peo-
ple, and producing changes in the every-
day lives of its constituents, which one

can point to anywhere in the country,
the country.

I and others writing recently in
Liberation have dwelt enough on
the consequences for the movement of
this fact that we agitate but do not
organize, we recruit but have no work
for new recruits to do. As one young
SDS activist put it recently, after a
certain amount of frustration you
decide that at least you can make
yourself into a brick and hurl yourself.

The question for the 1970s, then, is
whether we can find ways to work
through what Andre Gorz calls revolu-
tionary reforms: whether there is a
middle path between reformism and
adventurism. I want to argue that we
try. I suggest that this effort in the
1970s can be understood as a synthesis
of what was best in the political work
of the 1960s with what was best in the
political work of the 1930s.

What we have failed to do is to
make radicalism attractive, because re-
warding, to ordinary Americans with
jobs, children, cars, homes, taxes, and
installment payments. In seeking ways
to do this I think we can learn from the
older radicals whom we so readily write
off but who, nevertheless, organized five
million workers into industrial
unions and led 500,000 workers in
sit-down strikes in 1936-1937. The
organizers of the 1930s may have
something to teach us in just those
areas where our own work has been
weakest: the building of mass organiza-
tions, the bidding for real power.

Of course, the work of the 1930s
was also one-sided. The New Left
created movement without organiza-
tion; the Old Left, organization with-
out movement. In its concern to
defend the Soviet Union and to culti-
vate Franklin Roosevelt as a potential
Soviet ally, the Communist Party of

the 192
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44

August-Sept ember, 1969

the 1930s failed to project a socialist
vision and so built organizations which,
lacking this element, became partners
in capitalism. This was notably true of
the CIO. The war alone cannot explain
how rapidly the new industrial unions
surrendered their independence, gave up
the right to strike in wartime, purged
their radical members. Much blame
must also fall on the courageous organ-
izers whose work laid too much stress
on material, achievable, short-run objec-
tives, and too little on long-range goals.

The organizers of the 1930s tended
to be opportunistic, “economist.” We
of the 1 960s have tended to be
utopian and adventurist. A mass, revo-
lutionary socialist movement must
synthesize what was best in both ex-
periences.

The new kind of organizer I am
envisioning will build a new kind of
organization.

the end of the 1970s, hopefully,
there would exist in cities and regions
across the country organizations with
these three characteristics. In contrast
to a cadre organization of professional
revolutionaries, they would be based
on mass participation. Yet, unlike an
industrial union or a Social Democratic
political party, they would rely tactic-
ally on direct action from below rather
than on the delegation of power to
representatives. Finally, and particu-
larly by the end of the decade, they
would explicitly affirm the socialism

which would from the beginning have
been implicit in their choice of corpor-
ate targets.

In the movement today, people talk
of a dichotomy between the loose,
n on-ideological “movement” of past
years and the disciplined Leninist
“party” which they hope to create.
What I envision is a confederation of
local mass organizations which will still
be a decentralized “movement” but
which will not longer be made up
largely of students and other aca-
demics. It will preserve the best charac-
terisitcs of the New Left of the 1960s
but overcome the New Left’s major
weakness: its on-campus, isolated,

non-representative composition.

All over the country there are organi-
zers quietly resuming the long-term
building of grass-roots organizations
which SNCC abandoned in 1966 and
ERAP in 1967. Some worked in SNCC
and ERAP and doggedly continued after
those projects folded; some are South-
erners left without a regional network
by the collapse of SSOC (Southern Stu-
dent Organizing Committee); many are
women, concerned both to reach non-
middle-class working women and to de-
velop multi-issue programs; they may be
NUC (New Universities Conference)
members teaching in junior or com-
munity colleges; and some are members
of the Resistance, now beginning to
work with young people off campus.
There are common themes. For instance,
in Springfield, Massachusetts (see the

June Liberation ), Gary, Indiana and
Oneonta, Alabama, as well as in the dra-
matic workingman’s campaign in Laurel,
M i ssissippi, organizers are trying to
build around the idea of taxing the cor-
porations and using the proceeds to fi-
nance local welfare projects. Inter-
estingly, this was precisely the program
pushed by Stokely Carmichael and the
Black Panther movement in Lowndes
County, Alabama in 1965-1966.

This is a very different style of
work than that of summer projects for
students followed by fall national
demonstrations. The historical prece-
dent for that style is the Freedom
Summer and SCLC. Reversion to it
underlines the fact that those whose
rhetoric is most revolutionary are still
campus-bound.

For people drawn to a politics of
work rather than rhetoric, what are the
next steps? It might be fruitful to
create a series of low-keyed occasions
at which individuals and groups who
are committed to long-term organizing
in white communities come together to
share experiences. These gatherings, I
would hope, would pass no resolutions,
make no decisions, start no new
organizations. In somewhat the same
fashion as the old ERAP, this informal
network would exist side-by-side with
other movement structures, helping
working organizers to find each other
and then to find their way forward
together.

45

business, religion, and the left

Arthur Waskow

/during the past decade, the move-
ment has managed to “organize”
about 200,000 and to “turn on” at
most and for a moment about 20
million Americans in the new class and
the under class. During the next
decade two million or so people must
become the movement in the sense
that they organize themselves and
begin reaching out to turn on new
constituendes-in their own classes
and in others. (With 2 million organ-
ized, almost 200 million could be
“turned on”, at least for a moment.)

First, as to constituency: during the
’70s the strongest bases for the move-
ment will almost certainly continue to
be the new class— the information
owners, the students, professors, teach-
ers, social workers, civil servants— and
the under-class-the jobless and the
Black, Mexican, and Indian occupied
countries inside America. They are in
motion for partly different reasons,
but it ought to be possible for them
to stay in loose alliance. That is be-
cause the necessity of drudgery and
the drudge ethic are weakest in these

two classes, and the movement is
semi-consciously a twenty-first century
post-“work” (that is, post-drudgery)
civilization in embryo. The classes
most hostile to the movement (except
of course for the ruling class) have
been the hard-working people, the
nineteenth-century classes— the indus-
trial workers and the industrial “mid-
dle” ownership class of farmers and
grocers.

Hopefully, the existence of a large
group of people who have explicitly
rejected the system of drudgery, as-

46

August-September, 1969

serted their and others' right to play
politics and make love, and demanded
that the great social surplus be turned
from corporate and military profits to
making joyful life possible for the
drudgers-hopefully, the existence of
such a movement can turn on the
hard-working people, too.

But for that to happen, the move-
ment of twenty-first century people
must drop its snobbery toward work-
ers and small owners, must address
such concerns of theirs as taxes and
inflation and work rules and trans-
portation, must imagine how the
small-owners can drop, their habit of
domination while keeping pleasure in
entrepreneurship by joining in co-
operative and communal enterprises,
must imagine how the workers can
abandon their habit of obedience
while keeping their sense of solidarity
by instituting workers’ control.

Much will depend on the organiza-
tional forms the movement takes
during the next decade. For the
twenty-first century embryo will be
judged-and rightly-in large part on
whether it can live in that century
now, and do it well. The real politics
of the movement, in short, will in-
creasingly have to be “Show us!”
rather than “tell us”. It was enough to
write diatribes, sit-in against segrega-
tion, and resist the draft when there
were few of us. When we are many,
our own lives will be examined for the
workability of our proclamations.

J would argue there should be three
major overlapping organizational forms
for the movement, by 1980: a poli-
tical (not merely electoral) party; a
network of nonprofit businesses; and a
network of religious institutions.

The party is both most familiar in
our debates, and most strange to our
practice. I will return to it. The other
two-business and religion! -may seem
odd to propose to a radical movement,
but to me seem absolutely crucial— and
to be what we are already doing,
without knowing it.

Businesses : notice the underground
press, the Black cooperatives, the rock
groups, the movement bookstores and
head shops. The point: we have got to
support ourselves, and the only way to
do it is to peddle our goods and ideas

to each other and to the straight
society— unstraightening them in the
process-and to tax the proceeds for
new organizing. Conventional America
will have to pay us to radicalize and
organize it. Have to: because we have
the workable ideas and the honest
goods and the human, really human,
services.

The businesses, of course, should be
cooperative and communal, not capi-
talist. The “profits” ought to be
plowed back into more organizing,
where the customers are the new class
or other affluent people, and into low-
er prices, where the customers are
poor. Direction of the businesses
should be in the hands of the workers,
or workers and customers, with as
little hierarchy as possible. Every
effort should be made to rotate roles

as well as to elect managers. Whenever
possible, the business should be based
on a commune— a group of people
living together as well as working
together-in something like the fashion
of the Israeli Kibbutz. Some may
indeed be rural, agricultural,
Kibbutzim-channeling their food to
movement coop stores in the cities.
But in our urban post-industrial
society, most such communes will
themselves be urban, much more
specialized than the kibbutz (pro-
ducing a newspaper, selling books,

making records, teaching children, run-
ning a summer camp), and much less
sexually and psychologically repressive.

Arrangements should be made for a
movement “investment bank”-that is,
a way of channeling new investment
money into important new business
areas. “Important,” of course, not by
profit standards but by political
ones-and the “bank” board should be
chosen by the major movement group-
ings and by the businesses extending
their credit. (The proposed Peace Tax
Commission, intended to decide where
war tax refusers who want to contri-
bute their money to useful purposes
can best do so, might be a prototype
of such a movement “bank”.)

Religion: Already movement thea-
ters, underground churches, Buddhist
communities, sensitivity groups, have

sprung up around the country— trying
to bring body and spirit into touch
with cerebral intellect. If the move-
ment is to continue doing this — which
is one of its most basic thrusts— then it
ought to think in terms of small,
free-floating religious organizations in
some sort of loose network: what
might be called Free Churches (and
Synagogues, and Mosques, and
Temples) in which social-action pro-
grams are central rather than peri-
pheral, the clergy are community
organizers and mystics as well as philo-

Liberation

47

sophical teachers, large buildings are
avoided, and fusions of traditional and
new religious ceremonies are sought
that can address the traditional adher-
ents of each faith and embody its
particular urgencies and history, while
simultaneously binding together the
radical adherents of them all.

/luckily, American society has some
of its strongest rings of protection
around freedom of religion. (Not that it
is inviolable— but it is strong, certainly
stronger than freedom of
speech, press, and assembly.) For a
guerrilla movement operating from
institutional rather than territorial
enclaves, that fact suggests some spe-
cial tactical attractiveness in treating
our own religious impulses seriously.

Finally: a Party. How do we make
it, what should it be, how do We
transcend the bitter conflicts between
Black and various versions of white,
pacifist resister and revolutionary com-
munist? I do not see how, during the
next decade, a Party can be anything
but a federation of caucuses, agreeing
on a program where possible but
cheerfully agreeing to disagree when-
ever the constituency of each dictates
it. Certainly ethnic caucuses— Black,
Brown, and/or Third World, perhaps
during the next decade a Jewish one,
perhaps one of explicitly Christian
radicals; probably sexual caucuses;
probably class or occupational cau-
cuses (students; welfare recipients;
industrial workers); perhaps ideological
ones (anarchist, pro-drug, Worker-
student alliance). It should be fairly
easy to agree that any member of the
Party could be a member of two cau-
cuses; that any caucus with, say, one-
fifth of the whole Party membership
could veto a proposed party resolution
while leaving other caucuses wholly
free to support and organize around it
as their own.
r

hat goal for such a party? Both
electoral and non-electoral. Not just
electoral for President and Congress
and Mayor, but also for union shop
steward and school principal-for the
many elected (or should-be-elected)
jobs in the “private” organizations
that also govern us. For a radical party
would be through its own acts abolish-

ing the false distinctions between the
“public” and “private” governments,
restoring both to popular control.
Where elections were normal they
would be contested; where (as for
principal, police precinct captain, plant
manager) they are not normal they
would be invented and strong popular
pressure brought to bear for the elec-
toral victors to be seated

But a movement party could hardly
be electoral alone, and still reflect our
experience with direct-action politics. If
a Radical Party precinct committee or
workplace committee can decide to run
a candidate, it might also decide to lead
a strike, a march, or a sit-in-and so
could whole caucuses, or the Party
itself. For years we have needed to
reorganize ourselves from the ground
up for every new effort-to run a
candidate we have made a Peace and
Freedom Party, for the same people to
hold a march they must create a
Mobilization Committee. At the least a
broader electoral/non-electoral party
would keep alive the clusters of people
that could decide on the basis of a
political analysis, not simply on
o r ga n i z a tional inertia, whether the
movement was ripe for a march, a sit-in,
or an election campaign.

J^/|oreover, our national Party could
provide something the movement has
badly needed— a sense of national
“connectedness” in between such
momentary events as a Pentagon siege,
a Democratic Convention, a wave of
teach-ins, a Berkeley massacre, or
(even) a McCarthy campaign. It has
proved far easier to do “local organi-
zing” in one neighborhood when peo-
ple there know that all across the
country other neighborhoods are also
“locally organizing” for a national
end. The existence of a Radical Party
would provide that connective tissue.

Finally, the caucuses and local com-
mittees of a Radical Party should by
1980 be in direct, constant and serious
touch with analogous movements in
the rest of the world. The contact
ought not to come through the
national Party headquarters. If the
Super-powers are ever to be broken,
transnational movements of students,
clergymen, “Third Worlders,” secre-

taries must be able to keep the loyal-
ties of their members strongly commit-
ted to each other, not to the govern-
ments they live under. By 1980 politk
cal asylum for example, should be a
matter of course— extended not by
governments but by the radical move-
ments of many countries whatever par-
ticular movement is at the moment
under most pressure from its own
government. Even in calmer move-
ments, the actual physical exchange of
people across national boundaries
should be much more highly deve-
loped than it is today (and transporta-
tion will be cheaper and faster), so
that the radical movements can be
knit together not merely in theoretical
analysis but through personal connec-
tion.

If all this came to pass by 1980, I
should add, American (and probably
Soviet, Japanese, and European,)
society would clearly be in constant
crisis-unless the Establishments had
taken the one major self-protective
option open to them and moved
swiftly to abolish their respective war
machines. (That would free resources
and energy to deal with insurgency by
racing with a carrot at its nose instead
of a stick across its back.) In the
absence of such an “intelligent”
choice, the Movement will be facing a
very difficult non-pattern of repres-
sions and victories. We need to
examine much more carefully how to
nurture a movement in jail— how even
to force the jails to be a more human
environment in which it continues to
be possible to think and organize-and
how to protect our victories, our
liberations of institutional or geogra-
phic space.

A fellow at the Institute for Policy
Studies , Arthur Waskow’s publications
include From Race Riot to Sit-In.

Coming:
an essay on
ernest mandel

Staughton Lynd

48

August-September, 1969

Courtesy of Associated American Artists

women

Florence Howe

recently, on a train, a Goucher College student met the
e<Utor of a relatively new magazine. “Why don’t we get
your magazine?” she queried.

“Isn’t Goucher a girls’ school?”

“Sure, but what’s that got to do with it?”

“Well, we didn’t think you’d be interested-it’s about
careers.”

This is a perfectly commonplace attitude. Even in 1969,
it is assumed that women who go to college are generally
sitting out four years of their lives before becoming wives and
mothers. During my nine years at Goucher, I have found
little encouragement for any other view. Unfortunately,
statistics bear me out only too well. Though more women
than ever before go to college, and even receive degrees,
fewer proportionately go on to graduate school. The facul-
ties of colleges and universities naturally reflect this condi-
tion: there are "fewer women on the faculties of women’s
colleges than there were in the 30’s; the percentage of
women on the faculty of the University of Chicago has
dropped from 8% at the end of the nineteenth century to a
recent low of 2%; and a number of university departments
are searching currently for their token female. And as
studies continue to show, when men and women of
comparable education and experience are employed,

women’s salaries and rates of promotion are significantly
inferior to men’s. In spite of a century of sporadic hue and
cry about women’s rights, and in spite of our rhetoric
about the equality of women, even in spite of the pill and
the recent outburst of women’s liberation groups, women
remain a passive majority of second class citizens.

Our education is chiefly to blame, but of course after
one has said that, one must add at once that education
reflects the values of our society and is to a major extent
controlled by those values. That is to say that we do not
think of our girl students as we do our boys— and this is
true from the beginning of their school years as well as on
to graduate school where women are openly discriminated
against for reasons which I do not here need to list. What
would happen to men if women were, indeed, allowed to
compete in a system equally open to them? This is, of
course, a rhetorical question, since it is not likely to
happen. We do know that white men, in our culture, are
by and large loath to compete with black men, and our
friends tell us that women will have to wait until those
male racial and economic problems are solved.

Economic and political problems cannot, obviously, be
solved by educational institutions. But colleges can educate
their students quite deliberately to those problems, and

Liberation

49

even, if they will, to work towards their solution. Generally
speaking, the purpose of those responsible for the educa-
tion of women has been to perpetuate their subordinate
status. There is a hoary story still being told about the
difference between educating men and women. It goes like
this: “When you educate a man, you educate an individual,
but when you educate a woman, you educate a family.”
Obviously, the story is meant to compliment women as
traditional carriers of culture. But more to the point is the
role that woman is channelled into by her culture. The
question of purpose in education is dependent upon a prior
notion of hierarchy. Put another way, education is pro-
phecy fulfilled: imagine women educated for a push-button
household and a consumer’s life and you create institutions
to effect that. To illustrate, I want to look at the views of
five men— I choose men because for the most part they
have been responsible lor our history and our education.

first, Plato and Aristotle, who illustrate two poles:
the revolutionary believer in equality between the sexes
and the conservative believer in the inferiority of women.
Plato, as revolutionary, writes in the Republic that, “There
is no occupation concerned with the management of social
affairs which belongs either to woman or to man, as such.
Natural gifts are to be found here and there in both
creatures alike; and every occupation is open to both, so
far as their natures are concerned.” He concludes, there-
fore, that “we shall not have one education for men and
another for women, precisely because the nature to be
taken in hand is the same.” When he describes roles for
women, he allows them “their full share with men” in all
areas of life, “whether they stay at home or go out to
war.” He continues, “Such conduct will not be un-
womanly, but all for the best and in accordance with the
natural partnership of the sexes.” Obviously, Plato’s
notions have not only not prevailed; they are hardly known
today.

To read Aristotle on the same subject is to learn how
little a student may learn from a teacher. For to the
question “why educate women?” Aristotle would have
answered, “Certainly not.” This is his key statement, from
the Politics'. “We may thus conclude that it is a general law
that there should be naturally ruling elements and elements
naturally ruled. . . . The rule of the freeman over the slave
is one kind of rule; that of the male over the female
another. . . . The slave is entirely without the faculty of
deliberation; the female indeed possesses it, but in a form
which remains inconclusive. ... It is thus clear that while
moral goodness is a quality of all the persons mentioned,
the fact still remains that temperance— and similarly forti-
tude and justice-are not, as Socrates held, the same in a
woman as they are in a man.” Aristotle thus offers no
education to women. Or if we think of her in a category
close to the slave’s, only such education as will make her
more useful to man, her master. The defining of capa-
bility-or “role definition”-controls education. And Aris-
totle’s voice has prevailed. He and the early Church fathers
settled the non-education of women for nearly two
thousand years.

Milton’s is a useful voice to illustrate the perpetuation
of woman’s subordinate status in a form somewhat more
subtle than Aristotle’s. In fact, Milton is my favorite
example of such a view, one that I find still dominant
today. To Goucher students, I usually say, study him
closely: he is the enemy. You must understand your enemy
if you are to defeat him. Women are teachable, Milton
says, though just barely and only under careful conditions.
Certainly, they need to be observed and looked after
constantly or trouble may follow, as it did for Eve in the
garden. But the order is plain enough: God teaches man
and man teaches woman, just a bit of this or that, enough
to keep her in her place. Milton’s main idea is hierarchy:
woman is subordinate in status, inferior in intellect, and
even less reliable than man in matters of the heart.

Jn matters of the heart, Jonathan Swift has argued,
either sex might claim distinction— for foolishness and
corruption. “I am ignorant of any one quality,” he writes
in “A Letter to a Young Lady on her Marriage,” “that is
amiable in a Man, which is not equally so in a Woman; I do
not except Modesty and Gentleness of Nature. Nor do I
know one Vice or Folly which is not equally detestable in
both.” If women are more full of “nonsense and frippery”
than men, their parents are to blame for failing “to
cultivate” their minds. “It is a little hard,” Swift continues,
“that not one Gentleman’s daughter in a thousand should
be brought to read or understand her own natural Tongue,
or be judge of the easiest Books that are written in it. . . .”
Swift’s remedy is to offer himself as tutor for the young
lady in question; in Gulliver's Travels , he recommends
education for both sexes.

^/|/lien I asked my studems what they thought of Swift-
expecting at least some delight or surprise at his
modernity— one sophomore said, “Why, he’s insulting. I
didn’t like him at all.” She added that his attitude was
patronizing and demeaning: “He doesn’t care anything
about the girl. All he cares about is that she please her
husband. That’s why he wants her to be able to read. So
that she can carry on a conversation with him.”

Marianne’s sharp disgust surprised me and some of the
other students present, one of whom commented gently
and slightly in wonderment: “But that’s just why I’m going to
college and taking English courses. My boy friend is at
college and I think that I should be able to keep up to his
interests and his friends. You know, I want to know what
he’s talking and thinking about,”

foth students had in mind a passage in which Swift
offers his young lady a rationale for the education of her
intellect: /‘to acquire or preserve the Friendship and
Esteem of a Wise Man, who soon grows weary of acting the
Lover and treating his Wife like a Mistress, but wants a
reasonable Companion, and a true Friend through every
Stage of his Life. It must be therefore your Business to
qualify yourself for those Offices.” That is, to function
interestingly for one’s husband— or children. The question
of self or vocation is entirely absent, as it is from the
concerns of the majority of women in college today.

50

August-September, 1969

About a hundred years after Swift wrote his essay,
Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill began a long and
complex intellectual relationship, one of the results of
which was a book that Mill published in 1869 called The
Subjection of Women . Like Swift, Mill believed that sexual
differences do not entirely, if at all, control the intellect.
Women are not a separate and lesser species but, as Mill
put it, they are a separate class or caste, created and
controlled by men through a process of socialization that
includes depriving women of education.

1 want to quote from Mill’s book at some length
because I think it is still the best single piece of analysis
and because it is his only significant work not available in
paperback. First, his argument about the alleged inferiority

of woman’s “nature:” “Standing on the ground of common
sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that
anyone knows, or. can know, the nature of the two sexes,
as long as they have only been seen in their present
relation to one another. If man had ever been found in
society without women, or women without men, or if
there had been a society of men and women in which the
women were not under the control of the men, something
might have been positively known about the mental and
moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of
each. What is now called the nature of women is an
eminently artificial thing-the result of forced repression in
some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be
asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents .
have had their character so entirely distorted from its
natural proportions by their relation with their masters. . . .”

Women’s relations with their “masters,” according to
Mill, are unique for an “enslaved class,” for two reasons;
their universality in time and space, their perpetuation
seemingly without “force.” “The subjection of women to
men being a universal custom,” Mill begins urbanely, “any
departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.” On
the other hand, most women accept their state. In fact,
“All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely
that women should be collectively rebellious to the power
of men.” Thence follows an analysis by a “master” of the
master’s point of view: “Women,” Mill begins,

are so far in a position different from all other subject
classes, that their masters require something more from
them than actual service. Men do not want solely the

Courtesy of Associated American Artists

obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All
men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the
women most nearly connected with them, not a forced
slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a
favority. They have therefore put everything in practice
to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves
rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear— either fear of
themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women
wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned
the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All
women are brought up from the very earliest years in
the belief that their ideal of character is the very
opposite to that of men; not self-will and government
by self-control, but submission and yielding to the
control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is
the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities
that it is their nature, to live for others, to make

Liberation

51

complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life Mill concludes this section of his book by summarizing:
but in their affections. And by their affections are “In no instance except this, which comprehends half the

meant the only ones that they are allowed to have- human race, are the higher social functions closed against
those to the men with whom they are connected, or to anyone by a fatality of birth which no exertions, and no

the children who constitute an additional and inde- change of circumstances can overcome; for even religious

feasible tie between them and a man. When we put disabilities ... do not close any career to the disqualified

together three things-first, the natural attraction be- person in case of conversion.” The remedies Mill proposes

tween opposite sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire depend- are changes in law and the opening of educational and

ence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has vocational opportunities to women. His ideal is “freedom

being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; of individual choice” regardless of sex: “If the principle is

and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, true, we ought to act is if we believed it, and not to

consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more

general be sought or obtained by her only through him, than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner

it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position

men had not become the polar star of feminine educa- through all life-shall interdict people from all the more

tion and formation of character. And this great means elevated social positions, and from all, except a few,

of influence over the minds of women having been respectable occupations.”

acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail It is a pity to spoil Mill’s peroration with a sour note,
themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding but he makes, in the end, a nineteenth-century distinction

women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, between married and unmarried women. Whatever her

submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into talents and inclinations, the married woman ought to stay

the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual at home— for practical reasons at least. No housekeeper can

attractiveness. replace her with economy and efficiency both. When he

52

August-September, 1969

Courtesy of Associated American Artists

pleads for woman’s presence in the university and at the
bar, Mill is pleading for the unmarried woman alone.

Obviously, in 1969 we do not officially hold to Mill’s
distinction between married and unmarried women. And
yet our suburban style of life institutionalizes Mill’s notion
of economy: by the time a woman pays for a baby-sitter
and a commuter’s ticket, she might just as well stay at
home. In fact, though our forms may look different,
essentials have not been altered for the majority of women
since Mill’s day. And some beliefs about us harken back to
Aristotle and Milton, though now they are part of the
unconscious of college-educated females. For example, the
basic assumption about women’s biological inferiority, dealt
what one might have expected to be a death-blow in the
1940’s by Simone de Beauvoir, comes to college annually
in the heads and hearts of freshmen women.

Four years ago, I began to use as a theme in a freshman
writing course “the identity of woman.” Some of the
corollary reading assigned has included D.H. Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers , Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the
Heart , Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook , Mary
McCarthy’s The Group , Kate Chopin’s The Awakening ,
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex , a collection of
essays entitled Women in America , and Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man. In every class I have taught, someone has
asked, “Why are our books only by women?” or “Why do
we have to read mostly women writers— they’re always
inferior to men.” Even in something as simple as athletics,
girls have been eager to point out that female swimmers are
inevitably inferior to male swimmers. Only once in all the
classes I have taught did a student point out that males of
some cultures, say Vietnam, may be physically “weaker”
than females of another culture, say the Soviet Union or
the U.S. And I have typically received lengthy essays
“proving” that women must be inferior since in the whole
length of recorded history so few have been truly great. At
the same time, I should point out that a questionnaire I
used did not verify the impressions I gained from class
discussion and student themes. It was as though the
students answered the questionnaire in terms of what was
“supposed to be.”

^Jhe same split occurred with regard to the question of
women’s social equality. On paper, the students indicated a
belief in its existence. In class and on themes, they gave
evidence that they lived their lives in the chains Mill
described and analyzed. Their dependence on male approval
came out particularly in discussions of coeducation, though
with varying degrees of openness and consciousness. Close
to the surface and freely aired was the question of dressing
for boys. It was a relief, students said, to be able to live
whole days at Goucher in jeans and no make-up. And they
joked about looking very different-sometimes unrecog-
nizably so-when they left the campus for a date or a
weekend. Very few students said that they dressed in a
particular way to please themselves. Much more difficult to
get at was the deeper question of sexual role in the
classroom’s intellectual life. I have had only a few students
able to say, as one did this year, at the beginning of an

essay, “Men distract me.” In fact, that was why she had
come to Goucher. In high school classes, Virginia became
aware of her unwillingness to be herself: either she was
silly or silent. Here at Goucher, she said, she was able to
say what she thought without worry about what boys
would think of her. Moreover, she was going to be a lawyer
because that was the most “male” occupation she could
think of. She wanted to show that she could do what any
man could. If she could manage that, then she could be
“independent,” and that, she said, was a meaningful goal.

"J/nginia is an exception. Obviously women go to college
today in numbers that would boggle Mill’s brain. But most
come without genuine purpose, or, when they discover
purpose, it is in Mill’s or Swift’s terms. About halfway
through one term, my freshmen were talking about the
motivation of a character in a story by Doris Lessing. Joan
tried to make a point about the complexities of motivation
by saying that she had come to Goucher only because her
parents had wanted her to go to college and this was as
good a place as any and that for nearly a whole term she
had been wondering what she was doing here, but now she
understood what her purpose might be, not only here but
for the rest of her life. The class hung on her words, but
she grew suddenly shy of naming her discovery. Finally she
said, “Enjoyment. I think that I am here to enjoy not myself
but life— and also later on, after I get out of college.” Joan
was immediately chastized for “selfishness:” “The purpose
of life,” another student said, “is to help other people.”
Most of the twenty students sitting in the circle proceeded to
take sides; a few tried to reconcile the two positions:
“helping other people” might itself be enjoyable.” “If you
enjoyed tutoring in Baltimore slums,” one girl retorted,
“then you weren’t doing your job properly.” The discus-
sion raged as few classroom discussions do. I said nothing,
except at the end when we had to stop for supper. Then I
commented that no one had mentioned, in more than an
hour, earning money or having an ambition or vocation; no
one had talked about the fulfillment of her identity in
terms of satisfying and useful work. The girls were not
particularly astonished; my terms meant very little to them,
at least at that time. The girls who were most numerous
and most vocal were those who thought that “service” or
“helping people” should be performed for its own sake,
because that was morally right, not as an enjoyable act
for the individual to perform or for any other reason. This
is the woman-slave mentality that Mill was describing a
hundred years ago.

Jt is clear that a social order sends girls to college who
are generally unconscious of their position in that society.
And on the whole, colleges do very little to sort out the
conflicts girls feel. How can they please themselves and
please their (future) husbands and/or satisfy the demands
of class and society? Their conflicts have grown sharper,
more fierce and destructive, since Mill’s day. For women a
hundred years ago, the problem was to fight for the right
to an education or to be allowed to vote. Women have
these rights. But in fact a woman is— unless she closes her

Liberation

53

eyes completely— pulled terrifically in two opposing direo
tions. They are not parallel lines: marriage and career.

On the one hand, she is still playing with dolls, dressing
to suit boys, and pretending to be dumb in a co-ed high
school class. She is still a continual disappointment to her
mama if she returns from college each term without an
engagement ring. She wants— and naturally so— to get mar-
ried and have children. To assume that a career would not
conflict with marriage and child-rearing, at least as our

present society is arranged, is an error.

On the other hand, her college education assumes that
even if she is not going on to a career or graduate school,
she should specialize for two years in some particular area
of knowledge. The curriculum, moreover, doesn’t help her
to work out the dual roles she may have to assume, that is,
if she is not simply a housewife. It assumes, largely, that
the problem doesn’t exist. The curriculum ifc geared to
vocation, however narrowly conceived. An English major will

August-September, 1969

i

send you to graduate schools, for example. But nothing I can
Hunk of at Goucher prepared women for marriage or
motherhood.

do we educate women? Cynically, I might
answer, to keep them off the streets. Certainly, we are not
thinking of them even as we do think of men— as the
future engineers and administrators of a complex bureau-
cracy. Then why design curricula for women that are
remarkably similar to those for men? Why, especially when
they and their teachers assume a lesser degree of serious
intellectual commitment from female than from male stu-
dents, even from those avoiding the draft. I have heard a
few male professors at women’s colleges candidly admit
either the “ease” with which it is possible to teach women
or the “bore” it is. And women like me fret about the
“passivity” of our students. But mostly we do little to
promote a reawakening or an altering of students’ or faculty’s
consciousness. “There, there,” one professor was
overheard saying to a weeping freshman, “don’t cry about
that paper. In a few years, you’ll be washing dishes and
you won’t even remember this course. 7 ’

1 have spent a lot of time on the purpose of education
because I think that we must be conscious of our motives.
Are we, as one student put it recently, educating girls to
become “critical housewives?” I for one am not, not at
least any more than Hopkins’ professors are educating
“critical husbands.” We can do better than that for our
students and I think we should. Women and men both
need work lives and private relationships. Women need to
be educated for consciousness about themselves as members
of a society they can learn to change. Even if women are
to spend some years of their lives at home with small
children part or all of the day, these are few years when
compared to a lifetime. Without what I call a
“work-identity,” moreover, women, their families, and
society generally lose a great deal.

But now I want to turn to the means: what can colleges
do for the education of women? I am not speaking simply
of women’s colleges, for even if we were to inaugurate
instant coeducation, the problems would remain the same.
If we consider the candor with which some administrators
of hitherto male colleges have discussed the function of
incoming female students, in fact, the problems may mul-
tiply. As one dean put it to me, ‘The girls will keep our
men on campus weekends.” The three programmatic sug-
gestions that follow are aimed at coeducational institutions
as well as women’s colleges. The first two are curricular in
nature,

1. The most traditional approach is to recruit women to
programs hitherto open chiefly to men (e.g., architecture,
engineering, international relations) or to create new insti-
tutions to train women professionally in those careers. For
example, a woman’s college might add to its campus a
school of architecture that gives graduate degrees. By and
large, this is the way that the education of women has
proceeded in the past, though women have been channeled
into nursing, teaching, social work, rather than allegedly

“male” careers. I do not wish to disparage this procedure—
obviously it is useful that it continue— but by itself it can
do little more than to open doors for handfuls of indi-
vidual women, leaving the bulk of their sisters behind.
Philosophically, moreover, it does nothing more than to
say, see, women can be architects, if you, the male world,
will allow them to be. We know that already.

2. The second approach is one that has come historically
out of the civil rights movement, and recently out of an
analogy to black and third world studies programs: the
development of consciousness about the psychology and
sociology of sexual differentiation in western and other
societies. A freshman study program that combines litera-
ture, sociology, psychology, and history, would usefully
introduce the subject to students; inter-departmental
women’s studies programs may be devised or particular
courses (e.g. in the history or sociology of women) be
added to existing departmental offerings. I value this
curricular direction because it calls not for competition
with men but for the growth of understanding by both
men and women about how society is arranged. Such
understanding is essential to intelligent action for social
change as opposed to individual advancement.

3. The third suggestion would commit the institution to
educate the rest of its members. That is, the administration
of a college, the procedures and literature of its admissions
or vocational placement offices, for example, ought to
reflect a conscious militancy about the education of
women. The education of faculty members and admini-
strators, male and female together, would support and
promote the curricular program suggested for students.
Such a program would not be easy to arrange. It is
difficult, in reality, for men to see women as their replace-
ments. And women who have come up through the usual
channels of individual competition with men may not
readily understand the need to reexamine their perceptions
about sexual differentiation.

Needless to say, instituting a series of programs at one
or even several colleges can hardly correct a condition that
is fundamental to our society. But colleges can raise
consciousness and offer students some tools with which
to solve problems as well as the optimism necessary for any
political solution.

Florence Howe attended an all-girls highschool in N. Y, C.
and Smith College. She has taught at Goucher College
for nine years and is active in RESIST and the New
University Conference .

Coming

letter from new Orleans

bob zellner

55

Liberation

JJ8UJV pewpossv *o Asounoo

Guide to the Grand Jury

j[t wasn’t the Justice Department or
the FBI or Daley. Johnson or Nixon
who decided that leaders of last sum-
mer’s Chicago actions should be tried
for a federal crime. Not technically,
that is.

Officially a grand jury did it. Other
grand juries have indicted black mili-
tants and student activists. Many of us
who do not face criminal charges have
already been called as grand jury wit-
nesses or will be soon. We’re learning
first hand how, in a society divided
along lines of race and class, legal
institutions are used by the powerful
to perpetuate the status quo.

The purpose of legal repression is to
intimidate and isolate us from our
base. Unless we are careful, repression
can divert needed energy into defense
groups for raising money and publi-
cizing repression.

Brian Glick and Kathy Boudin

jfhe Grand Jury. Part of the Bill of '
Rights. A bulwark of American justice,
supposedly serving three vital func-
tions.

As the “conscience of the com-
munity,” the Grand Jury is supposed
to protect people against unfair prose-
cution. Until it finds that the govern-
ment has substantial evidence, no per-
son can be tried for a serious crime in
federal court or in the courts of nearly
half the states. (In the other states and
for non-serious crimes, a judge makes
this decision in a preliminary hearing.)

As “the people’s big stick,” the
Grand Jury is supposed to investigate
official misconduct. In many states it
can issue a muckraking report even
when it decides no crime has been
committed.

Finally, the Grand Jury supposedly
provides opportunities for citizen parti-
cipation in government. To the presi-
dent of New York’s Grand Jury As-
sociation it represents democracy in
action:

Effective government can func-
tion— and our communities can
maintain their vitality— only so long
as the ordinary citizen can and will
participate in determining the cir-
cumstances under which he lives his
life. Even before our country
achieved its independence, grand
juries were a means by which
ordinary citizens have had a direct
and powerful voice in the conduct
of community affairs.

A close look at what the grand jury
really is and does illustrates this
general principle. Those who now ac-
tively oppose the status quo-youth,
blacks, poor people-are excluded from
jury duty. Moreover, the Grand Jury
does not itself exercise significant
power; it is controlled by the prose-
cutor (D.A., U.S. Attorney), who uses
it as a weapon against movements for
change.

^he Grand Jury originated in the
13th century in England as a corps of
knights assigned to help the Crown
identify and prosecute criminals. In the
United States today many Grand Juries
still consist mainly of “blue ribbon”
aristocrats.

From 1938-43 the federal court for
the southern district of New York
(Manhattan, Bronx, and Westchester)
drew jurors primarily from Who’s Who
in New York, Who’s Who in Engineer-
ing, the Social Register, the alumni
directories of Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
and Dartmouth, and Poor’s Register of
Executives and Directory of Directors.
Many of these people stayed on the
jury panel for years and helped indict
the Rosenbergs and many Smith Act
defendants. The federal court agreed
that this procedure systematically ex-
cluded black people and workers. But
it still upheld the procedure as an
efficient way to find jurors who were
properly “qualified.”

r J~o6ay many states use only slightly
more subtle methods to select similarly
elite juries. The grand juries which
indicted Huey Newton and the Oak-
land Seven, for instance, were picked
only from names provided by the Ala-
meda County Superior Court judges.
Twenty-six company presidents, 31
bankers, 5 utility executives, and a
number of realtors and other business
officials were among the 261 jurors
selected by the same method in San
Francisco from 1950 to 1968. Non-
whites, over one-third the San Fran-
cisco population, provided only five
percent of the jurors.

The New York County grand juries
which have indicted Columbia strike
leaders and Black Panthers are not
much different. According to an ana-
lysis prepared for a court challenge,
the New York grand jurors who sat in
1964 were 1.65 percent black, .003
percent Puerto Rican, and slightly over
1 percent blue collar. None were under
35. Most lived in census districts with
a median income of over $10,000 per
year.

These jurors were chosen from
names supplied by judges and other
grand jurors, plus anyone who applied
in person at the jury clerk office. Over

56

August-Sept ember, 1969

nine-tenths of the panel from which
New York juries are now picked quali-
fied at a time when a grand juror was
required by law to own at least $250
worth of property. The chief jury clerk
admits that his office still rejects any
applicant under 35 unless he is recom-
mended by a judge. The clerks also
exclude anyone on welfare, anyone
who was ever declared bankrupt, and
anyone who has a lien or judgement
outstanding against him. As the New
York Times recently put it, “credit
checks screen out fly-by-nights and un-
reliables.”

Recent civil rights legislation gives
federal defendants the right to a jury
“selected at random from a fair cross-
section of the community.” The new
law also prohibits exclusion from fed-
eral grand juries “on account of race,
color, religion, sex, national origin or
economic status.”

The real effect of this reform is
only to open the federal Grand Jury to
the salaried middle classes. Jurors’
names are drawn only from lists of
voters or persons registered to vote,
despite the well-known fact that dis-
proportionately large numbers of
blacks, Puerto Ricans and poor people
take no part in the electoral process.
Jury clerks continue to exercise vase
discretion— remaining free, for example,
to treat misspelling on the required
written application as proof of disqual-
ifying illiteracy. Finally, the clerks ex-
cuse from jury duty any wage earner
who claims financial hardship because
he might lose his job as a result of a
month’s absence or because he can’t
support his family on the juror’s fee.
(Most states pay only a few dollars a
day. The new law raised the federal fee
from $10 to $20 per day, still only
half what the U.S. Labor Department
estimates that a city family of four
needs to live decently.)

(jrand juries are made up mainly of
white, middle-aged and elderly repre-
sentatives of the propertied and mana-
gerial classes. It’s hardly surprising that
in their watchdog function such grand
juries protect their own economic and
political power and their social privi-
lege. The reports issued by San Fran-

ciso grand juries during 1968 con-
demned “welfare chiselers” and drug
use, while supporting freeways and
downtown redevelopment and giving
“special recognition” to the police de-
partment’s tactical squad.

The unrepresentative make-up of
the Grand Jury combines with the
tructure of the legal process to ensure
that the Grand Jury will rubber stamp
the prosecutor, not protect the people
against unjust prosecution. Most grand
juries are mystified by the techni-
calities of the law. They serve only one
month every two or three years. They
have no staff except for the prose-
cutor’s office, and they are not al-
lowed to hire outside experts. The
prosecutor manages the proceedings,
bringing documents and witnesses,
leading the question and drafting the
indictment which the jury approves.

If one grand jury refuses to issue an
indictment the prosecutor is free to
call another jury and yet another until
he persuades one to go along. If a
grand jury decides to indict someone
he doesn’t want convicted, the prose-
cutor can always find a way to let the
case die. In some states he has the
legal right to dismiss any indictment.
In the others he can neglect to proceed
on the case, accept a guilty plea to a
trivial charge, or try the case in a way
which allows the defendant to win
easily.

A defendant can gain nothing from
grand jury proceedings. He and his
attorney are excluded from the jury
room. They cannot cross-examine the
states’ witnesses or object to questions

put to friendly witnesses. In federal
courts and in many states the de-
fendant cannot appear before the
grand jury even if he does discover
that it is discussing him, and in other
states he can testify (and then leave)
only if he agrees to allow the prosecu-
tor to use anything he says against him
at trial. Although the prosecutor auto-
matically receives the transcript of the
jury proceedings, the defendant can see
a copy only under special circum-
stances and with a court order.

Though the grand jury is useless to
defendants, it can help the prosecutor
in several important ways. When press-

ed to bring to trial someone he wants
to protect, the prosecutor can have the
case killed by a grand jury of “or-
dinary citizens!” The Brooklyn D.A.
used this tactic with great success
when a police officer shot a black
youth in 1965. The grand jury issued a
report exonerating the cop. D.A.
Koota said there was nothing more he
could do, and the courts rejected
CORE’S petition demanding further in-
quiry. Precisely the same technique is
now being used to protect the off-duty
cops who attacked Black Panthers near
a Brooklyn courtroom.

Through a grand jury report-one
which names names— a D.A. may be
able to prosecute in the mass media
opponents against whom he could
prove no case in court. Black militants
in Cleveland were harassed in just this
way after that city’s most recent
“riots.” In the early Fifties a New
York grand jury report accused offi-
cials of the United Electrical Workers
union of membership in the Com-
munist Party, which was not a crime
even then, and recommended that the
National Labor Relations Board decer-
tify the union.

The prosecutor’s third possible use
of the grand jury is to deprive a defen-
dant of the tactical advantages of a
judicial preliminary hearing. At a pre-
liminary hearing a defendant need not
take the stand or present any part of
his case. The defendant’s attorney can
discover the state’s case and cross-
examine its witnesses; if the witnesses
change their testimony at trial, he can
quote from the transcript of the hear-
ing to cast doubt on their honesty.
Since court dockets are almost always
crowded, defendants can use pre-
liminary hearings to gain time before
they have to stand trial. Attorneys for
the Columbia strikers used preliminary
hearings to delay almost all trials until
the fall, when a new University admin-
istration withdrew most of the charges
against the students.

Since the grand jury serves the same
procedural functions as the preliminary
hearing-both are supposed to protect
against unjust prosecution and both in
fact rubber stamp the D.A.-the defen-
dant is not entitled to both a prelimin-
ary hearing and a grand jury. In federal

Liberation

57

court and in states which use grand
juries, a person cannot be required to
stand trial for a serious crime (felony)
until he is indicted by a grand jury.
But in trials for the minor crimes
(misdemeanors) that most people are
charged with, the prosecutor can
choose between preliminary hearing
and grand jury. If the defendant re-
quests a preliminary hearing, the prose-
cutor can simply stall the case until he
obtains a grand jury indictment.

The New York D.A. used this tactic
to avoid repeating his Columbia fiasco
when CCNY students were arrested
this fall for giving sanctuary to an
AWOL soldier. The students were
booked, charged and bailed out in the
ordinary manner. They then planned
collectively for the expected next
stage, the preliminary hearing, at which
many of them were going to represent
themselves so they could more effec-
tively present their political views. To
the students’ surprise, and the surprise
of their lawyers, the D.A. presented
grand jury findings on the basis of
which the judges denied requests for
preliminary hearing and immediately
set dates for trial.

finally, the prosecutor can use the
grand jury to force potential defen-
dants’ friends and comrades to talk
with him and turn books and papers
over to him before trial, unless they
assert their Fifth Amendment privilege
against self-incrimination. He can use
the transcript of the grand jury pro-
ceedings at trial to contradict a defense
witness who changes his story. He may
be able to trap a witness into lying to
the grand jury and then convict the
witness of perjury, even if he doesn’t
have enough evidence to try the wit-
ness or anyone else for a substantial
crime.

The prosecutor has these powers
only through the grand jury. Ordinarily
we are no more required to talk with a
D.A. or U.S. Attorney than with the
FBI or the police. We can refuse to
talk with any of them without fear of
being jailed for contempt of court. (A
person who lies to such officials can,
however, be prosecuted for willful mis-
representation. In the Fifties political
activists frequently were trapped into
petty lies and then were forced to

inform or spend several years in jail.)

The power to compel testimony
through the grand jury gives the D.A.
even more than significant technical
advantages. It provides him, and the
government generally, with a powerful
weapon for terrorizing people active in
movements for social change.

The grand jury meets in secret and
is surrounded by an aura of mystery.
Not only are the prospective defen-
dants, the media and the public ex-
cluded, but a witness cannot even
bring his own lawyer into the grand
jury room. His attorney can be in the
hall, and the witness can be excused to
consult him, but this is a far cry from
having counsel at his side throughout
the proceeding. The D.A. may well be
able to pressure him into answering
questions he shouldn’t answer and to
embarrass him so he will leave to talk
with his lawyer only rarely.

The grand jury proceeding is the
only situation in which a person can
legally be forced to talk to the author-
ities entirely alone, with no lawyer or
friends to advise and support him. The
prospect of such an ex perience can
terrify even the strongest and most
experienced of activists. The govern-
ment tries to intensify these fears by
calling witnesses separately, or only a
couple at a time, and encouraging
them to respond as isolated individuals.

Most of the people called before the
Chicago federal grand jury quietly ap-
peared and talked. By acting indivi-
dualistically they reinforced the sense
of loneliness and terror which the
grand jury evokes. They failed to draw
on our one source of psychic and
political strength in confronting the
enemy on his turf, the power of collec-
tive action.

Some of those who talked in Chi-
cago thought they could persuade the
jurors to refuse to issue indictments,
an unlikely prospect given who sits on
grand juries and the fact that the deci-
sion to indict had already been made
politically and was only being imple-
mented through the grand jury. Others
believed they could outsmart the U.S.
Attorney, which seems equally unlikely
since we never know just what the
prosecutor’s looking for and when

seemingly harmless information will
help him. Since the grand jury meets
in secret and no one can be certain
precisely what any witness said, testi-
fying cannot help but spread suspicion
and distrust within the movement. Co-
operation with the grand jury also rein-
forces its legitimacy and leads even
more people to believe it is in fact the
protector of justice that it pretends to
be.

Activist recent success in talking be-
fore HUAC in no way indicates that
the same approach would be appro-
priate in responding to the grand jury.
HUAC could be made to look ridicu-
lous and its hearings could be used as a
political platform because, unlike the
grand jury, HUAC meets in public,
with the media present. Moreover,
HUAC can use the information it
gathers only to recommend legislation
and publish propoganda; it has no
power to issue indictments and use
testimony before it as the basis oi
criminal prosecution (except for per-
jury or contempt).

Strategy before a grand jury must
also be distinguished from strategy be-
fore a trial jury. Trial juries are rela-
tively more representative than grand
juries (though not made up of the
“peers” of most defendants); the de-
fendant generally has power to exclude
obviously biased jurors, plus some
others. While the grand jury hears only
witnesses’ answers to the prosecutor’s
questions and then confers privately
with the prosecutor, the trial jury
hears the defendant’s full case-as he
wants it presented-and hears the pros-
ecutor only in open court.

The people who testified in Chicago
(continued on page 67}

A mangled version of this article ap-
peared in the June , 1969 Liberation.

Because of the article’s importance ,
Liberation is presenting it here in its
proper form .

58

August-September , 1969

PAX AMERICANA

Chris Pollock

Dragged backward from sleep
By an embryonic fear
Into the smothered
Darkness of the room
I hear the chronic
Muttering of drains
And dimly hear
The tolling bells
In all the scattered
Valleys of the world
Mourning the young war dead.

A volume of Tacitus
Haunts my mind.

Parched blood on the earth
The stones with sticky lips
Crying out.

Prodigies creeping from wombs
And the Roman People
Hiding their eyes
With their hands.

SUNSET

East Side drippy flats
Iron wounded in their sides.

From mossy complicated taps
Women lather beneath open skies.
The lank wind mutters
Among pot-bellied laundry lines.
Carries in its evening coils
The smell of suppers on the boil.

OBITUARY

His death to be announced:

In all the scattered

The stones with sticky lips

He was lowered to the grave
One dun Sunday in November,

The earth drummed its fingers

Softly on his coffin

Filling up his memories with earth.

And then the hush of ground and stars.

Liberation

59

Reflections on the Moon

Paul Goodman

7 he Moon landing was mankind being great at several of
our best things, exploring, making ingenious contraptions,
cooperating with a will to do it, drawing on the accumulation
of history whether we think of the equations of Galileo,
Kepler, and Newton or the roving Polynesians, Vikings,
Columbus, and Magellan. And not least, lusting to see at a
distance-the pictures a second later were as sensational as
the trip. People do beat all! When the first Sputnik flew on
October 4, 1957, I wrote a sonnet that was published in
Liberation , and it is still so:

curiosity, a better level of chatter. Why do some radicals lose
their common sense when they talk politics? To tell a child
or a man that he mustn’t have ice cream or liquor because
there are starving Armenians is to be so “serious” as to
deserve to be taken seriously. And when it is a matter like
space-exploration that embodies so many ideals and even
human imperatives, to be cold to it is to be taken as not for
real or even immoral.

There is nothing ironical in the fact that we can land on
the moon but can’t make traffic move or feed the hungry.

A new thing with heavenly motion made by us/
flies in the sky, it is passing every hour/
signalling in our language. What a power/
of thought and skill has launched this marvelous/
man-made moon, and suddenly the gorgeous/
abyss lies open, as you spring a door /
to enter and visit where no man before/
ever came.

It is a mysterious/

moment when one crosses a threshold/
and “Have I been invited?” is my doubt./

Yes, for our wish and wonder from of old /
and how we patiently have puzzled out/
the laws of entry, warrant we have come/
into the great hall as a man comes home.

This combination of itching exploration and complicated
machinery is, of course, a peculiarly Western mask of man,
Faustian man-the Boodhisatvas tended to embark on inner
space-voyages, with psychological technology. But ours is
one of the ways of being that mankind has invented/
discovered; and in our times it is a worldwide way, including
the Orient and Africa, that we are going to continue,
however arduous, or we revert to barbarism or annihilation.

To belittle these things is to miss the worldwide public
feeling. Eldridge Cleaver and Noam Chomsky have called the
event a circus, but this is polemic spite and snobbery.
(Apparently, only MIT professors have a right to noble and
exciting games.) For a hundred fifty years the Americans
have had a propensity to do everything, good, bad, or
indifferent, in a glare of publicity and coverage; and indeed
the Moon stories were rather sweet. Some scientists have said
that to send up a package of instruments was all that was
necessary; but they don’t understand that we are excited by
a new horizon for ourselves, not a file of data; and I don’t
believe-or don’t want to believe-that cold calculations are
as good as our experience, however naive. Again, I don’t
think that the economic priority has been so bad as the
radicals say. The cost amounted to less than l A% of the
G.NP., and these are our cathedrals— in advanced countries,
science and scientific technology have been the dominant
religion for a hundred years (sometimes diabolic). We ought
to see to it that everybody lives well, but a part of living well
is blowing money you can’t “afford” on big excitement,

NASA can’t make an epigram or a metaphor either. All the
resources of society can’t educate a child or give a poor man
freedom or me happiness. All these take different kinds of
soul, all good. It is politically a disaster to try to play one
good against another, for people stick to what they do value.
Consider the exquisite care for safety in our space program-
it is astounding that there was only one accident that cost
lives; if there had been the slightest hint of sacrificing a life,
there would have been universal outrage, as there was an
outcry about the little monkey; yet we ruthlessly destroy
people on battlefields, in jails, and in slums. But it is
pointless to say that this is hypocrisy, for it is not hypocrisy;
it is that people have not been made to think through and
feel their ruthless acts. Discuss those in their own terms.

It is claimed that we have to judge the Moon adventure as
part of a whole social picture, in terms of comparative
importance and a rational balance of costs. I don’t think so,
not in cases on the edge, like this. What good Samaritan,
artist, amorous kid, or guerrilla ever judges with that kind of
balance? Indeed, commanding the Moon landing was the
only action of John Kennedy that rightly fitted his adoles-
cent mentality and therefore had grace -contrast, e.g., the
inappropriateness of such a personality during the Cuban
missile crisis. It’s too bad he didn’t live to bask in the glory.

If we take the Moon enterprise in its own terms, however,
as something unquestionably to be done and worth doing,
there are some sad and unpleasant things to be said about the
context and style. From the beginning, the context of a race

60

August-September, 1969

with the Russians has been bad. Going to the Moon and the
planets is too big, too scientific, too historic, too dependent
on all mankind and too future-laden for all mankind, to have
gotten entangled in the Cold War and in propaganda. The
race has been shameful. The secrecy and national competi-
tion have gone counter to the spirit of Western science and
have added to the current degradation of science. I have been
surprised that the scientists did not protest it more concert-
edly; but it seems appallingly obvious, for instance from the
stupidity about the UN flag, that except for the Cold War,
Congress would never have voted the money. I did not notice
a Harris poll about international cooperation; I wonder what
it would have shown. At least in the government’s official
image, e.g. the statements of the astronauts, we have been
much less chauvinistic than the Russians. And bad as the
present situation has been, we must remember that when
Columbus put in at Lisbon after his first voyage, the King of
Portugal plotted to banish him and his ship from the face of
the earth, before the news got abroad.

The race has been especially unfortunate since space-
exploration is a natural for international cooperation, like
the Geophysical Year, the World Health Organization, and
UNICEF. There has been enough sentiment for internation-
alism to generate the LIN treaty against annexation. I still
have the wan hope that putting effort, capital, and communi-
cation systems into transnational activities can drain energy
from the insane aggrandizement of the sovereign Great
Powers. Perhaps now that the first hectic flush of the race is
over, we can go back to this idea. There is a good proposal
before the UN to launch an orbiting platform for the use of
all nations; and the Powers may take it up simply because it
makes economic sense, and they are broke.

The horror of the military auspices and aura speaks for
itself. The Pentagon and our military-industrial corporations
and the military powers in the Kremlin have been boosting
the space ventures every step of the way; every part of the
technology is potentially a weapon; the satellites are used for
spying; and we even toyed with an armed platform, in
violation of the UN treaty. The brute fact is this: if the
Russians can hit Venus at 30,000,000 miles and we can
photograph Mars at a similar distance, we had all better rely
on disarmament rather than “defense.”

We thus have the ambiguity that many people are excited
about exploring space, and the mass of mankind kind of
think it’s right; and I have no doubt that there are very many
fine but craft-idiot scientists who want to do the work so
much that they blink at the auspices; but on the other hand,
Ihe funding, organization, and technology are inextricably
(angled with the war machine. Inevitably, with the colossal
hypocrisy for which we are famous, the official space
statements of the President all have had to do with peace.
And indeed, the public coverage has stuck with remarkable
purity to the adventure, the wonder, and the ingenuity, with
almost no martial or imperialist overtones. This is how
people want it.

Partly because of the military auspices-but, of course, it
is a deeper disease in our country -our astronauts, the images
of the enterprise, have been strangely homogeneous in
biography, men in their late thirties with 2.2 children and

combat records, from small towns, etc. One has to be
cautious when there is so much risk to persons and capital,
but I guess that a draft resister, a Puerto Rican dropout, a
farm mother of five, or even a queer might have been trained
for the job equally well. The Russians seem to have collected
more various and colorful types.

I consider these events in terms of human history,
however, one aspect has been more disturbing than any of
the above; it was so from the beginning a dozen years ago
and it was salient in July 1969: the overwhelming collectivity
of the enterprise-the thousands upon thousands of industrial
workmen and clerical staff and grease -monkeys and profes-
sors and technicians, busy as ants and accurately inter-
locking, going through hundreds of simulations in order to
get everything by rote, and determined by the computer.
And the other armies of TV teams and scientists with their
lasers, seismographs, and chemical retorts, worked into the
scenario. It is possible to think away the militarism-one way
or another we will have to get rid of it in this generation or
we are done for-but if mankind has a future, how to cope
with this inevitable collectivity?

I do not mean that the people seem robotized. On the
contrary, they look willing, earnest, attentive, I say “like
ants” advisedly; and there is a beauty in this collective
action. If they were robotized, there would have been
blunders and catastrophe, not achievement. Yet there is a
terrible loss of flashing spirit and personality. For instance, I
do not know the names of the architectonic scientists and
inventors, and in this set-up it would not be right for them to
take a bow. Rejected Goddard can exist only as the name of
a space center. With the best will in the world (and oh, do
they have will!), the TV teams cannot make the astronauts
look like anything but tame adolescents-though Neil
Armstrong roused my fellow-feeling by his decent uneasiness
at putting his foot down, in that airless world and blinding
sunlight, on the ground that might sink beneath him. In this
enterprise, we certainly seem to see Teilhard de Chardin’s
transcendent Noosphere, the super-mind, in operation.
Nevertheless, as an anarchist and a psychologist I am quite
convinced that this kind of environment is not viable; if it
becomes universal, no child will learn anything, the culture
will become Byzantine, and civilization itself become brittle
and break.

Think of it in the future and in the present. We will
pursue these explorations and hopefully colonize-so
Buckminster Fuller thinks and urges, and he is a wise
predicter. As always in the past, the culture and style of the
colonies must depend on the character of the colonizers and
the organization of the colonization. To give an example, the
Polynesian sailors who crossed two and three thousand miles
of open sea to settle Hawaii brought a brutal theology, a
savage feudalism, and a most rudimentary culture compared
with the grace they left behind-but what would you expect
from bully rovers with ants in their pants? And inevitably, all
present talk about space colonies consists of mining and
cryogenic operations carried on by computerized personnel.
Bear in mind that in history the colonies have sometimes
become far more important than the mother countries.

Liberation

61

yind at present, what must be the effect on the man in the
street? These great achievements not only, justifiably, deter-
mined fashion in behavior and language— ow! “Roger”
“Over” “All systems go” “Houston, I’m on the porch”— but
they must also, not quite so justifiably, make people believe
that there can be no great achievement except in this
collective style, no science but Big Science, no growing up
and culture except plugged into the Noosphere. As the
editorial in the Boston Globe put it, much as they sympa-
thize with the hippies, to go to the Moon you’ve got to be
pretty square. I don’t think there is any simple solution to
this problem. As Coleridge said in a similar context, referring
to the Industrial Revolution and the Manchester economists,

I “In order to have citizens, you must first be sure that you
have men.” We must willingly affirm this grand collectivity;
it is not evil if people do identify with it and are not coerced;

and if it is necessary for the on-going human adventure, we
must go with it or commit historical suicide. At the same
time, in order to have live people at all, we must multiply all
the anarchist things, education that delays socialization,
decentralization wherever it is possible, do it yourself,
weakening the State. It will not be easy to show the ordinary
man that these directions are compatible. Maybe they are
institutionally not compatible. If so, we are at a dead end.

For, in candor, I must add one other, very gloomy
thought. I have had it from time to time, but it struck me
most forcibly during the Christmas voyage when they looked
back at the Earth spinning below. Given how people have
been polluting and destroying that earth, the astronauts
sometimes seem to be like callow adolescents, abandoning
the place where they have tossed their beer cans. But it’s my
yard.

62

August-September, 1969

Courtesy of Associated American Artists

An Exchange

Brothers & Sisters,

In ‘The Movement: a New Begin-
ning” Staughton Lynd cites three
examples (Chomsky, Cohn-Bendit, the
Wobblies) of anti-elitist thinking about
people’s socialist self-activity “at the
point of production”— at the points of
productive contradiction throughout
their daily lives. He’s critical of histo-
rians who neglect evidence of this. But
his own treatment of SDS-Resistance
relations deserves just this criticism.
Even when showing a compatibility of
thought between the two groups, he
bases it on leaders 9 relations and is
necessarily led to discuss “what caused
this happy state of things to
deteriorate”— since it certainly has

deteriorated if one looks only at lead-
ers’ pronouncements.

Again, Lynd’s second “history” of
the Resistance since April 1968 shows
how he sees SDS and the Resistance as
separate organizations vying for the
leadership role (“a position to play a
key role in building the broad libera-
tion movement”) in “revolutionary
general strikes.” To say this, one must
ignore or discount people’s self-
activity.

But Lynd’s history of the Resist-
ance before April 1967 shows, to my
mind, something closer to his notions
of good history— if only because the
organization didn’t really exist. I think
something else is working when he
deals with the Resistance and SDS as
organizations. His view of their vying
for leadership of late helps explain
why, besides talking history, so much
of Lynd’s— and Calvert’s “A Left Wing
Alternative”— talk sounds like apolo-
getics for the Resistance and subtle
condemnation of SDS, to the point of
not paying any attention to analysis,
only to leaders’ {other leaders’) talk.

And implicit in the apologetics is a
criteria for leadership: it shall accrue
to the most humanist. So the apolo-
getics continually violate another prin-
ciple of Lynd’s. He warns us against
dealing in stereotypes— a sure indica-
tion (when used to achieve leadership
roles) of opportunism. But he and Cal-
vert both move in the world of which-
group-to-pin-which-stereo type-on.

The stereotypes are all too easy. On
the one hand: Leninist-Stalinist middle
class guilt masochist martyrdom (bad).
On the o t her : Humanist-combining-
sophistic ated-analy sis with-a-humane-
spirit-reminiscent-of-the-movement-in-
the-early-1960s-with-consensus- deci-
sion-making-emo tional-openne ss-and-
decentralizated-structure. ‘The charac-
teristic Resistance manner” is “seeking
out an individual at a time” and “a per-
sonal, deep communication type of poli-
tics” (so good).

^uch egotripping. In his preface to
the second edition of Capital ,
Marx notes that once the bourgeoisie
established itself in the early 1800s, in
place of genuine scientific research
there came “the bad conscience and
the evil intent of apologetic.” Please

note how Lynd ignores substance and
analysis (“genuine scientific research”)^

The key difference between Lynd’s
two “histories” since 1968 is precisely
the fulfillment of the criteria-“a com-
prehensive political program”-which
SDS folk like Steve Weissman, Mike
Goldfield, others used to criticize the
original Resistance strategy.

Moreover, among the criticisms of
the Resistance was the same conclusion
that Lynd comes to: The forms of
protest of the Resistance were/are
forms for elite college students, con-
sequences of the class character of the
channeling system. It is in this context
(not as “a further argument” separate
from it) that Carl Davidson and Hamil-
ton’s criticism, as I remember it, was
conducted: The forms of protest of
the Resistance were/are “charac-
teristically middle class”— whatever the
sentiment they express.

fiut in Lynd and Calvert we see a
specific objection taken to being
accused of “the politics of guilt.” What
has been at issue has not primarily
been such identification of motivation
and sentiments, but instead the ques-
tion of adequate analysis and program:
the class nature of the oppression AND
OF THE MOVEMENT AGAINST IT’
This is the issue when we try to fight
the recapitulation of capitalist styles
within the movement (e.g., male chau-
vinism and class supremacy). The issue
is not whether guilt over such style is
motivating shoddy organizing, but
whether the style itself is to be an
object of our analysis.

I for one never thought the critic-
ism of the Resistance rested on the
notion of a politics of guilt. But Lynd
and Calvert may think it did and thus
counterattack. But to redo the argu-
ment now and to ignore its questions
of political analysis strikes me as part
of an opportunistic attack on SDS.
Especially when the counterargument
says that “affirmation rather than self-
denial was the emotional kernel” of
the Resistance. Affirmation, strength,
self-reliance— aspects of a fighting
humanism— parts of an argument to
make the Resistance the most human-
ist.

Somehow, says Lynd, the personal,
open humanist affirmation has been

liberation

63

wiped out of SDS (Calvert is no longer
attending meetings) while continually
confirmed in the Resistance. This leads
to a characterization of SDS as dog-
matic and manipulative, which actually
characterizes male leadership forms
throughout the movement. It is yet to
be shown that this characterizes the
bulk of SDS members’ movements.
What it does do, of course, is build the
Resistance imagemaking.

Lynd says “perhaps one should turn
the SDS critique of the Resistance
inside out, and argue that during the
past year SDS has been reverting to
the very politics of middle-class self-
flagellation which it charges to the
Resistance ; that is, that since the
spring 1968 National Council meeting
SDS has asked white people again to
play the role of auxiliaries to other
peoples’ radicalism.” While this may
characterize the Rudd-Klonsky postur-
ing, it does not characterize the debate
and analysis that has dealt with the
question of racism (and explicitly the
question of “white demands”). It
doesn’t characterize Noel Ignatin’s

lynd replies;

We have all been through six
months of factional activity more in-
tense than we ever expected to en-
counter in the New Left. I am sure
this has left scars on all participants,
myself included. An aspect of factional
activity is that people simply encoun-
ter each other less (closed caucusing
reinforces this), and in an atmosphere of
isolation stereotypes flourish and lead
to further isolation.

Before responding to any of Jon
Weissman’s particular points, I want to
make it dear that I share what I be-
lieve to be his central concern, namely,
that all involved rapidly ex tricate
themselves from habits of name-calling
and get on with work. Work, apart
from its other virtues, is also the best
approach to breaking down the fac-
tionalism which has prevented work.

If Jon Weissman believes my talk at'
the Resistance conference praised the
Resistance because it “simply fulfilled
its original notions,” I think he should

work, which has been vital to the
analysis being developed, it doesn’t
characterize the Southern Conference
Education Fund, and it does not
characterize the debate ,at the Ann
Arbor (winter 68-69) NC.

Lynd and Calvert exaggerate or per-
haps really ignore the politics of the
position on racism. Lynd makes anti-
racist work SDS’s “primary political
activity ” (I have shifted the emphasis
in the phrase; Lynd italicized “pri-
mary”). Carl Davidson did a good cri-
tique of Calvert (June Liberation )
doing the same thing, so I won’t dwell
on it. But just note how the terms
neatly separate the humanists from the
dogmatists (Totalitarians).

Note also: Liberation reprints Lynd
and Calvert together, instead of Calvert
and Davidson (and not Calvert-
Davidson-Calvert!). Imagemaking.

What seems to be working in all this
is an attempt by humanists to be the
most humanist. Somehow, the image
is, Resistance practice has simply ful-
filled its original notions, rather than
shaped and been shaped by struggle

reread it. Surely its thrust was to criti-
cize the Resistance for permitting itself
to define Resistance work by the act
of draft card return. In so doing the
Resistance has become not only single-
issue and single-constituency, but
single-tactic. I believe I share with Jon
Weissman the concern that the move-
ment reach beyond a middle-class and
on-campus constituency, and moreover
that I made this plain in the Blooming-
ton talk which Liberation printed.

Aside from the extended quotation
of Greg Calvert’s speech at Princeton
in spring 1967, I don’t believe my talk
dwelt on or even identified leaders.
Even in referring to the Princeton
speech I thought I made it clear that it
illustrated a rank-and-file mood expres-
sed in the button, “Not With My Life
You Don’t.”

a Jon Weissman may have noticed
after writing his letter, I tried to deal
with the work of Noel Ignatin and of

and humanism. Working with the
Movement for a Democratic Society in
Springfield, Mass., I know we cannot
make a morality out of talking to each
person one by one.

The other side of this Humanis-
testism is that SDS has deteriorated
into a dogmatic centralist white-guilt
machine. A view fostered by looking
only at the factionalism when (as Lynd
has seen) two (actually at least three)
elitist groups see SDS as a group to
recruit from.

The begged question is the real one:
What are the people doing? In their
development as a movement it’s not an
easy answer of pat stages and deteri-
oration at the hands of Leninists and
Stalinists. I sense, because the Resis-
tance sees its style as more humanist
than the SDS NO collective, a willing-
ness to acquiesce in the destruction of
SDS as a movement group and in the
elitist notion that there is one move-
ment style.

With a good deal of concern,

Jon Weissman

the Southern Conference Educational
Fund in an essay in the July Libera-
tion . There I suggested, consistent with
the analysis of the Bloomington talk,
that the approach to racism which em-
phasizes surrender of “white skin privi-
leges” does indeed encourage the emo-
tion of guilt and does not necessarily
produce substantive assistance to the
black liberation struggle. I hope Jon
Weissman will join in discussion of
these problems in future issues.

Thus I find most of Weissman’s
specific points unconvincing. Yet I be-
lieve he puts his finger on an element
of organizational chauvinism which was
present in that Bloomington talk. He is
probably right, too, in suggesting that
a certain glorification of humanism-
abstracted-from-political-work went
along with this. I am grateful to have
the opportunity to reemphasize that
what I hope for is the building of mass
organizations, controlled from below,
which practice militant direct action
without becoming inhumane. Whatever
leadership the Left requires belongs to
whichever groups or individuals prove
most creative in that work

64

August-September, 1969

"

Letter to the Movement :

The EnglishTeacher as Civilizer

Barbara Kessel

“. . . at Dexter and elsewhere the
faculty assume that it is their duty to
replace the students’ actual culture
with an alien culture. Missionaries
from these graduate schools, like
clergy from colonial empires every-
where and in every time, feel confi-
dent that what they bring is good
for the natives and will improve
them in the long run. In culture, as
elsewhere, this is manifestly not
so.”

So wrote John McDermott in an
article quite famous on the Left, “The
Laying on of Culture.” This article
caused me to realize what 1 have
teamed in six years’ teaching from my
students— white working-class high-
school students, professors’ kids at
Iowa, both urban and rural, women on
welfare who were paid to go through
“Manpower Training,” and the militant
Black students at Malcolm El Shabazz
Community College. What I have
teamed, gradually and painfully, was
lhat every last assumption and attitude
that my graduate school training had
instilled was destructive.

The first and most common insight
which occurs to people teaching Eng-
lish on a lower level than the univer-
sities is that most of the courses we
had are irrelevant to the task, seeing as
how the “non-elite” will not relate to
Dryden and Pope, Chaucer and Beo-
wulf (the elite aren’t exactly eager for
(hem either), and it has been many a
year since our freshman composition
courses. Still there are text books of
literature and paperbacks which can be
i appropriately used and we do have our
tool bags of critical principles and
techniques. Most of us have managed
from there, and when we ran into the
total student rejection phenomenon
[The Red Badge of Courage stinks!”
“Yea, right.”), we fell back on the
comforts of “I’m Only Trying To Help
You” or “You’ll See When You Go to

College” (a fantasy of a prestigious
professor saying, “77ze Red Badge of
Courage , that masterpiece of
irony . . and the student, properly
shamed, remembers his Philistine rant-
ings of olden times.)

What many teachers never suspect is
that most of the students have their
own critical principles. (I can hear the
snorts and harumphs at the very idea.)
The most important principle held very
dear and in common is the non-
objectivity of any critical statement
about art. Two-thirds of a “college
prep” high school class fought me and
the remaining compliant third of the
class to a bloody standstill over their
right to “a poem means whatever any-
one sees in it.” One guy even went
into the community taking 1 sample
reactions to some poems, to prove his
point. Why did a group of 16-year-olds
get so excited over an abstraction
seemingly far removed from their lives?
So that they can protect their “NO”
when some teacher says “Buttons” by
Carl Sandburg is a good poem, but
Phillip Freneau’s “To the Memory of
Brave Americans” is sentimental.
Another class got very insulted over
that “sentimental,” and the class
apologists argued that the word “senti-
mental” was merely a put-down word
that some people used to describe
other people’s emotions, which they
didn’t happen to feel.

It is very satisfying to recall the
spirit with which those students con-
ducted their cultural resistance strug-
gles on the battleground of literature. I
have since taught classes which were
waiting for the Word on what was
Good before anyone would venture an
opinion. However, the great advantage
possessed by the future mechanics and
file clerks who made up the bulk of
that high school was that grades were
of no concern to them. Passing was
important, but that presents a prob-
lem to very few. (High school adminis-

trations usually convey an implied
grade ratio to the teachers; too many
F’s mean a bad teacher.) “A” grades
would not help them get a job or hold
one, and they knew this Ml well. In
fact, good grades were openly devalued
by the students as a sign of excessive
conformity. One fellow who got an
“A” for the term quite unintentionally
had to put up with teasing from his
friends, who made up a game called
“Herbie’s Road to Success,” which was
a maze full of dead-ends and only one
right way to get out. Although “one of
the boys,” Herbie was not one of the
cultural warriors.

fiut if they were unimpressed with
the power of a course grade, there was
still something which they held in awe.
That something is the ultimate weapon
in the colonial kit of the English
teacher: the language— his sacred trust,
the substance of his sacerdotal func-
tions. Practically everyone who does
not speak or write in the dialect of the
socially powerful (“he do, don’t he?”)
feels that his language is bad. Just like
“bad hair” and a whole lot of other
oppressive values, the language is now
beginning to undergo transvaluation
among Black people, but not among
poor and working-class whites. The
only defense they have is to keep their
mouths shut and write as infrequently
as possible and very carelessly. The
students pretend they wrote their
themes on the bus, even when they
didn’t, the implication being that one
could do better if he had taken some
time with it.

There are three types of English
teachers with respect to the use of
language by students: 1) The high

priest who has the language on tablets
which were brought down from the
mountain long ago. He spends most of
his time on grammar and loves it for
its own sake. He also knows what is
good for the students, while they do
not know as yet. 2) The Protestant
missionary who brings the language as
a means for the clever to become
socially mobile. He is for the students.
His mission is to create Eliza Doolittle
successes, and he devotes much time to
correcting papers. He doesn’t claim to
know what is best for all his students,
but he does have the secret for those

liberation

65

chosen few who dream great dreams.
One modem, hip type spends some
time on the study or discussion of
dialects, which concludes with some
form of the dictum that “your lan-
guage is as good as anybody’s, only
don’t use it on paper or in school.”
This way the teacher can prove to
himself that he is not racist, national-
istic, or snobbish, and yet fulfill his
function as a colonialist. After all, the
department insists, the school requires,
and the society demands. What else
can he do? 3) The marginal church
man whose ministry is in the streets,
bars, and community or campus meet-
ings, whose main battle is with church
establishments to force them into
“relevance” and humane uses of their
power. (I called him marginal because
his tenure is usually temporary.) This
kind of teacher, a John Holt or a
James Herndon, wants the students to
speak and write with freedom and
growing pride, out of their own dreams
and sense of what is best for them. He
neither corrects papers nor dispenses
grammar, and his energies go into com-
batting “the way it spozed to be” in
the mind-sets of his students, his col-
leagues, administrators, and recently
even in the Modern Language Associa-
tion (Mother Language Association).
He also devotes himself to learning his
students’ language, so he can appre-
ciate their culture, the significant pat-
terns in their lives as they perceive and
expre ss them. 0 nly if he has this
understanding can he aid in theii

defense, their cultural resistance strug-
gles. Some of this type still believe in
the Eliza Doolittle myth but have too
much compassion and integrity to be
irrelevant to all their “normal” stu-
dents and end up being captivated by
what they find. Others are radicals
who know that the social system does
not have the capacity to absorb even
significant numbers into higher levels
in the hierarchy of jobs and status, and
that for an individual to turn himself
inside out-trade in the dialect of his.
family and neighborhood for a stutter
and a white collar is a very bad deal.
He doesn’t even make more money
after all that. As for power, the kind
that can be gotten by non-elites, it has
nothing to do with academic refine-

ments.

have a dream: All of types one
and two become transformed into type
three and copie forth tomorrow, bum
their g r ammar books and their

red pens out of the window in full
view of the students and set about to
further convince the students that it is
now safe to communicate. What would
happen then? In my experience, the
students test the situation for a good
while, then plunge into something or a
variety of things with fury and passion,
criticize each other, and demand reac-
tions from everywhere. Herb Kohl and
James Herndon have chronicled this
experience with Black childrea I have
seen it happen, not only in a class of
Black college students, average age of
24, but also in a ninth grade of all-
white and culturally advantaged. In
time, with this kind of energy released
at all grade levels around the country,
there would be an explosion of new
cultures. People would be deeply invol-
ved in the creation and the criticism of
culture that was integral to their own
lives, rather than standing and watch-
ing that which is contradictory to their
lives. How alienating is it to see life
through the form and spirit of a musi-
cal comedy or a TV serial.

However, all would not be well in
this projected future, for culture does
not come to life and survive in a
vacuum. As Herb Kohl observed, his
sixth graders had to re-learn “the way
it spozed to be” to survive in the rest
of the school system, as well as in
their Harlem world. This explosion of
creativity and participation would
attract the vultures of culture, who
would swarm to package and sell it for
profit to passive consumers, as we have
seen happen to rock-and-roll and folk
music, once-vital art that belonged to
the people, not Columbia Records.

This process both degrades the art and
deprives the artist of his base to relate
to. Thus this creation of culture must
be tied to a defense of culture, a
political resistance, both in the school
and in the community. Culture with-
out politics is a hundred flowers blos-
soming and being plucked instantane-
ously by the same folk who deplete
our physical environment continuously.

What if a class of students write and
produce a great play, but it cannot be
put on in the school auditorium
because it offends the powers that
be— as any great play should? What if
the students have had this great experi-
ence of individuality and community,
yet go forth into a predatory or indif-
ferent community where there is no
opportunity to experience themselves
this way again and to relate to others
in co-operation? Of what good is it?

Politics without culture, on the
other hand, does not move the people.
People must experience their own indi-
vidual worth, as well as their national
worth if it has been explicitly denied
them, in order to be able to feel they
have a right to have rights. In the last
two years at Malcolm X College I have
seen dozens of students transformed
through their first contact with their
own culture in recognized forms and
structures. They are transformed from
quiet, apathetic, even anomic people
with solemn, heavy faces into people
with vitality, anger, humor, joy, des-
pair, and political consciousness. These
are students who jump in buses to go
to the state capitol and torment legis-
lators who are threatening the city
college with a tuition increase that
would stop half the student body from
further education, while the white stu-
dents mutter hopelessly to each other
about the tuition. (The result was a
narrow, fished-out-of-the-fire victory
for the anti-tuition forces, until next
year.) Thus I conclude that while the
defense of culture is political, the soul
of politics is cultural. It is that pool of
common meaning and beauty that
gives one courage and reason to strug-
gle for one another and for one’s self.

In the meantime, every English
teacher who aids in the national effort
to “civilize” the non-elite manages sub-
tly to convey that the students’ values
(literature) are lowdown and crude,
and that their language is ugly and
unacceptable for important communi-
cation. To the extent that they do
their job well, the English teacher,
perhaps more than any other type of
teacher, has helped to keep the natives
in their place.

Barbara Kessel teaches at Malcolm L.
Shabazz Junior College in Chicago

66

August-Sept ember , 1969

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(continued from page 58)

almost certainly could have refused to
talk without risking jail. The last three
witnesses, who planned their responses
with other movement activists and law-
yers, were excused by the U.S. Attor-
ney after they pleaded the Fifth
Amendment privilege against self-
incrimination.

The U.S. Constitution prohibits
federal or state officials from forcing
anyone to give any information which
might tend to incriminate him. Al-
though technically there is no consti-
tutional right to refuse to give informa-
tion because it might incriminate some-
one else, in practice the courts are
forced to accept almost all claims of
possible self-incrimination, since no
one can prove his testimony might
incriminate another person without in
the process incriminating himself.

The only legal obstacle to using the
Fifth Amendment is the grand jury’s
power in some courts and in some
kinds of cases, to offer a witness im-
munity from prosecution on the basis
of his testimony and then to have him
held in contempt if he still refuses to
talk. The Chicago witnesses who took

the Fifth were not offered immunity,
possibly because federal immunity laws
may not cover the supposed crimes
which the grand jury was investigating.

Taking the Fifth, like accepting a
deferment to the draft, still involves
some cooperation with the authorities
and still appears to accept the legiti-
macy of their power. As with the
draft, the alternative is total non-
cooperation leading to imprisonment.
(First Amendment free speech offers
no protection, as a number of people
on the left discovered when they were
jailed for contempt in the Fifties.)

The criteria for choosing between
the two possible responses are essen-
tially the same as those applicable to
Selective Service. What would be the
likely political impact of total refusal,
given the witness’s status and consti-
tuency? To what extent does the
movement seem ready and able to or-
ganize around a refusal? How would
the witness use his liberty if he
avoided jail? Can his use of the Fifth
Amendment be explained publicly in a
way which avoids (as the left did not
in the Fifties) the appearance of
defensiveness and of admitting having

done something wrong?

The decision almost certainly will
vary with time, place and person.
Whatever response is chosen, it is cri-
tically important that it be determined
collectively, on political as well as per-
sonal grounds, and that it be joined
with a political offensive against the
Grand Jury and the oppressive legal
system of which it is a part.

The witnesses who took the Fifth in
Chicago first moved in a highly publi-
cized court session to have their sub-
poenas dismissed. They used the court
hearing and press conferences to attack
the grand jury’s composition and pro-
cedures, as well as the prosecutor’s
breach of secrecy and the bias of the
judge who convened the jury. Other
methods of attack might range from
leaflets and guerrilla theater to provid-
ing sanctuary for a witness who re-
fused to appear or physically invaded
the grand jury room.

We need to attack the legal system
of the United States— courts, grand
juries, legislative committees, the ide-
ology itself— just as we attacked its
fraternal institutions, the university
and the Selective Service System.

Liberation

67

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activists around the country. Our next
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The Movement: A New Beginning

Staughton Lynd and Greg Calvert

Two articles based on speeches delivered
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Reprinted from the May, 1969, issue

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Regis Debray and Barbara Deming

Reprinted from the February, 1968, issue
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Waves of Resistance

Carl Wittman

A discussion of how the movement can
and ought to reach homosexuals, single
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made a connection between the diffi-
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society they live in.

Reprinted from the November, 1968, issue
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First Street School

George Dennison

A report on an important experiment
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Report From Revolutionary China

Dave Dellinger

Reprinted from the January, 1967, issue
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